Dolly Parton is making dreams come true.
Utah resident LeGrand Gold has been a fan of the country superstar his entire life. So when he learned he’d been diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer in 2021, the bucket list he made to keep his spirits up of course included a meeting with Parton.
On Friday, the “Jolene” singer, 77, helped Gold complete the bucket list item, giving him a surprise phone call just before Christmas.
“She sang a song, put my name in the song. I feel like I’m immortal now,” he told local NBC affiliate KSL of the chat with Parton. “That was really cool. It made me feel good.”
Gold’s wife Alice tells PEOPLE that the call meant the world to their family.
COURTESY OF GOLD FAMILY; CHRISTOPHER POLK/VARIETY VIA GETTY
“We’ve been flying above the silver lining for days,” she says. “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.”
In a video of the call that was shared to YouTube, Parton greets Gold as “LG,” and calls herself “Dolly P.”
“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,” she says. “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 honoring me with that.”
Gold, meanwhile, tells the star that she’s been “a huge help” amid his cancer battle, and Alice praises both her music and character, as well as her book gifting program Imagination Library, which Alice says was a help to her children.
As they wrap the call, Parton tells Gold she “will always love” him before quipping, “I should’ve sung that, shouldn’t I?” Afterwards, she does just that, swapping her famous lyric with, “I will always love LG.”
Gold, a computer programmer and father of five, is a Tennessee native who frequents Parton’s Dollywood and has long been a fan of her work, according to KSL.
Last year, Alice came up with the idea of a bucket list, called LG’s List of Living, that was written on a napkin and laid out nearly a dozen different items to accomplish, like attending a March Madness game, catching a Natalie Merchant concert and going on an RV road trip.
“He was going through a really kind of down phase of just over everything,” she told the outlet. “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?’”
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Together, they’ve accomplished several things on the list, like the Merchant show and the road trip, with Parton being the latest item to check off.
“I have gotten so many messages from all over the place,” Alice told KSL before the call. “That’s been the most heartwarming thing. Even if he never gets to meet Dolly, we’re at the end of his life and [strangers have] reached out and said, ‘I will do what I can. I don’t know you, but we want to make this happen.”
After his 2021 cancer diagnosis, Gold’s illness spread to his lymph nodes and liver, and in September, he was given a prognosis of less than six months to live due to liver failure, according to a GoFundMe page raising money for his family.
“About three weeks ago, the scan showed the cancer spreading and getting outside of my liver,” he told KSL earlier this month. “And so they say the chemotherapy’s not working anymore, the radiation’s not working anymore. They just sent me home and said, ‘Be with your family.’”
As Gold enjoys the holiday season with his wife and children, the family is still working to complete his bucket list. Alice tells PEOPLE that the couple is planning a fake wedding on Jan. 13 that will give their four daughters the chance to have a father-daughter dance with dad.
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