Lady Gaga is opening up about her close friend Tony Bennett’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
In an interview with E! News, the singer said she felt like the beginning of his disease was “a big ‘why me?’ moment.”
Bennett was diagnosed with the disease about a year ago. The pair’s recent Grammy Award-winning duets album “Cheek to Cheek” is a testament to their friendship that was fostered in the ’70s.
But the devastating illness made her and Bennett nearly a part of each other’s lives, Gaga said.
“We’re kind of about halfway through this. It was very hard for us to face it together. It was hard for us to come face to face with it together. Sometimes we get together, but other times it was hard. We lost our little house and a bit of our neighborhood. We lost the house we called home. We haven’t lived in our house since… going on 12 years,” Gaga said.
Gaga said she always recognized that something was different with her friend when he visited her at her home.
“The beautiful thing about Tony is, it’s what has really changed my life. I was the one that kind of made the extra effort to be by him when he would come to my home or I would come to his,” she said. “I took the extra effort to come by his house at six in the morning.”
There was a recognition of “Alzheimer’s on a bigger scale,” she said.
She did not address the details of Bennett’s death from a pulmonary embolism in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Valentine’s Day. He was 88.
“He is, and I always was, just Tony. I still am Tony, I’ll always be that person that I know him as — just a little more on the autistic spectrum. He’s still my best friend,” Gaga said.
NewsCore contributed to this report.