Rock icon Bruce Springsteen announced on Instagram that his mother, Adele Springsteen, died at age 98 on Wednesday more than 10 years after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
The Boss, 74, posted a video of his mother dancing to swing music, with a caption featuring lyrics from his 1998 song "The Wish," dedicated to her and recounting how she sacrificed to buy him a guitar when the family faced financial struggles.
Springsteen would often pull his mother onstage to dance with at his shows.
"My mother loves to dance. She grew up in the '40s… [with] the big bands and the swing bands, and that was a time when dancing was an existential act," he said during a 2021 Springsteen on Broadway performance, according to the Today show.
Bruce Springsteen shared that Adele Springsteen was diagnosed with Alzheimer's a decade before, acknowledging that the disease had "taken a lot away from us."
"But the need to dance hasn't left her," he said. "She can't speak. She can't stand. She can't feed herself. But when she sees me, there is always a smile. Still a smile. And there's still a kiss. And there's a sound which she makes when she sees me. It's just the sound but I know it means, 'I love you.'"
Bruce Springsteen recalled how he'd play Glen Miller for his mother, describing how she would start moving in her chair and reach out to him, prompting them to dance together.
"This is an essential part of mom's spirit, it's who she is," he said. "It's beyond language and it's more powerful than memory. It's the embodiment. This is what she has put her trust in and lived her life by and which, despite all she has suffered, she carries on with to this moment, as if life's beauty never deserted her. I love her."
In 2010, Adele Springsteen and her sisters appeared onstage as Bruce Springsteen spoke at the Ellis Island Family Heritage Awards.
"She held our family together under great, great, great difficulty," Bruce Springsteen said of his mother, according to People. "She did an unusual thing — her parents were relatively well-off and she married into poverty and served there for a good part of her life and really held us all together. Thank you, Mom. Love you very much."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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