Nurse Singing 'You Light Up My Life' to Elderly Man in Hospice Care Captured in Touching Video
Bringing light to someone’s life is an ultimate gift of kindness. For Robert Olson it meant his hospice stay was over, according to CBS News.
Robert Olson was admitted to Bronson Hospital in Michigan where he had the most caring of nurses.
Olson was ill and couldn’t speak when he arrived at the hospice, but soon he would find his voice.
Olson’s nurse Brenda Buurstra gave him a gift that he would never forget.
She sang him a song she heard he loved — “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone — to cheer him up and give him a little hope.
She didn’t know all the words to Olson’s favorite song, but she promised him she’d print off the lyrics so they could sing it together.
Little did she know, her melodic voice and caring touch was more uplifting than she could have ever hoped.
Olson’s daughter, Roberta Lytle, thought the day he entered hospice care was the last she’d see of her father.
“We did not think he was coming home this time,” she told CBS News.
Lytle was able to catch Buurstra singing to her father on camera, and miraculously, he soon began to sing along.
“It was very overwhelming,” she told CBS News with tears in her eyes.
And a week after their song, another miracle occurred: Olson was well enough to be reunited with his family and return home.
“It was like…he knew he was going home,” Lytle told CBS News.
Burrstra has been singing to patients for 14 years, but this was the first time she was ever caught on video.
Lytle was grateful that she had some more time to spend with her father, and that, to Buurstra, is all that matters.
“That, for me, is what nursing is all about. To touch their life, to touch their heart. To make that awful hospital stay that they’re having go through a little better, a little bit brighter.”
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