The amazing moment an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s-suffering Liverpool fan reacts to You’ll Never Walk Alone
The video was taken by his granddaughter, Rebecca, on his 85th birthday
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Your support makes all the difference.There’s something quite special about the sound of You’ll Never Walk Alone ringing out at Anfield on a Liverpool match day, with the anthem helping to inspire the club to victory on more than one occasion.
Since being adopted as the club’s anthem in 1963 when Merseybeat group Gerry and the Pacemakers, the thousands of Liverpool fans in attendance before each home game at Anfield belt out the song to try and lift the team, and it has come to be known as one of the most passionate songs in all of world football.
But while it obviously means a lot to the fans inside the ground as a collective, each individual supporter will also have their own memories of the anthem and what it means to them, and there is perhaps no finer example of this than in the video above that was posted on Twitter by Rebecca Smith.
The 15 second clip shows her 85-year-old grandfather, Joe, and other members of her family singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ together, but in the caption accompanying the video Rebecca reveals that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease – a horrible illness that affects an estimated 85,000 people in the United Kingdom alone, according to the NHS.
“Alzheimer's will never take away his love for LFC,” Rebecca wrote. “Happy 85th Birthday grandad Joe, you’re loved more than you will ever know! @LFC #Alzheimers #LiverpoolFC.”
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, and can lead to sufferers losing their memory and failing to recognise people that they would know.
But in certain special cases, something as small as a song can bring back those memories if even for just a few seconds, and what makes this video so touching is that Joe is seen singing the anthem at the top of his face with a smile on his face.
The video did not go unnoticed, either, as Liverpool’s official Twitter account sent him a happy birthday message in response to the tweet.
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