"Roberta Flack announces she has ALS"

Damn. “…“impossible to sing and not easy to speak”…” :cry:

Hard to believe she’s 85.

Such a beautiful voice, silenced by a most cruel disease.

Something similar is happening to Linda Ronstadt; she thought she had Parkinson’s but has since been rediagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, which killed Dudley Moore. :frowning:

I was sorry to read this. I loved her music in the early years. “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” still puts a lump in my throat.

I wish her all the best in her fight against a truly ghastly disease.

Oh no. Such an awful disease. My friend lost his word to it. It’s terrible.

Of all the shit I can think of, ALS is about the top of the list. A very good friend developed it about 10 years ago at the age of 45.

Wow. I’m not much of a concert goer, but Roberta Flack has the distinction of being one of only two famous musical artists’ concerts I ever attended - her and Arlo Guthrie (if Pousette-Dart band, which I understand was more of a regional phenomenon than universal, counts, it’s three).

When I saw her she was slightly pregnant, and she spoke touchingly about her hopes for her child - at that time, she did not know her child would be born with Down’s Syndrome.

She is a wonderfully original, passionate artist who seems to have had a life of ups and downs.* I wish her well and am grateful for the beautiful music she added to the world.

*ETA: oh shit. No pun intended.

Sorry to hear this. I’ve been working on my own version of “Killing Me Softly” on the piano for several weeks. What a beautiful tune, and her rendition is the gold standard.

mmm

This seems like a very late onset of the disease. The high profile cases that I’ve read about have involved people who contracted the disease in the thirties to sixties range.

Here’s some more info. (Gift link)

I knew a guy in college who was sooo attractive (I had kind of a thing for him…) and one day he told me that ALS ran in his family and he decided not to marry or be a father because of that. We lost touch, but I heard years later that he did indeed contract it and eventually died from it. :frowning:

Interesting factoids:

The average age a patient starts to present symptoms is 60, [Jonathan] Glass [who runs the Emory ALS Center in Atlanta] said, though he’s seen patients present symptoms as young as 18 and as old as 90.

Glass said everyone’s experience with the disease is unique. Some patients are dead within two years. He said he’s been seeing some patients for 20 to 25 years.

Wow, that is really a wide spectrum! It’s a tragic disease.