Dolly Parton surprises dying fan to help him finish his bucket list

Dolly Parton surprised one of her fans who is suffering from terminal stage four colorectal cancer as she helped him tick off a bucket list item.

The fan, Utah resident LeGrand Gold, was diagnosed back in 2021. Shortly after he decided to draw up LG’s List of Living with 10 items on it to complete before he died such as attending a March Madness game and going on an RV trip.

Three weeks ago during a doctor’s visit, he was informed that multiple treatments were no longer working.

“He was going through a really kind of down phase of just over everything,” his wife Alice told local NBC affiliate KSL. “So [I] just got out the napkin and started saying, ‘What do you want to do? What do you want to do before you die?’”

“The scans showed the cancer spreading and getting outside of my liver, and so they said the chemo is not working anymore, the radiation is not working anymore,” Gold said in an interview with the outlet. “They just sent me home and said be with your family.”

One of the items on the list written on a napkin was to meet the country singer. Alice took to social media, writing Dolly Patron asking her to help fulfil one of her husband’s final wishes of meeting one of his favourite artists.“I thought, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen,’” he told KSL.

He then randomly decided to answer a phone call that had a Tennessee area code. Before Gold knew it, Parton began talking to him. “Well, I’m just happy to know I have a fan that devoted,” she told him over the phone.

“Hey LG, it’s Dolly P. I’ve heard you’ve been a fan of mine for many years, and I just wanted to thank you for that.”

She continued: “I’m just happy to know that I’ve got a fan that devoted and that I’ve had a chance to watch that journey all these years. I’m just happy that we got to kind of have our journey together in this lifetime. I always want to make people happy with my music and with the things I do and the things I say and I’m just happy to know that I’ve touched your life in some way. So thank you for honouring me with that.”

Gold, meanwhile, told the star that she’s been “a huge help” amid his cancer battle, as Alice praised both her music and character, in addition to her book gifting program Imagination Library, which she said was a help to her children.

“Just know that I will always love you,” she continued to tell Gold before she broke out into song. “I should’ve sung that, shouldn’t I?” Afterwards, she does just that, swapping her famous lyric with, “I will always love LG.”

Following the call, Alice told People how much the phone call meant to both her and her husband.

“We’ve been flying above the silver lining for days,” she said. “Out of the 11 items [on the list], we thought Dolly would be the impossible, but true to Dolly form, she once again reminds the world that dreams really do come true.”