By Steve Almasy
CNN
(CNN) — Eight-year-old Laney Brown will never see Christmas again. Her doctors say leukemia will take her soon.
Laney loves music. Loves to dance, loves Taylor Swift, loves Christmas carols.
As her dying wishes, she asked to meet the country superstar and for some people to come by her house for a night of caroling, CNN affiliate WFMZ reported.
On Friday — her birthday — Laney and Swift video chatted through FaceTime, a software application that allows callers to see each other on Apple products.
Saturday night the singers came. At first it was hundreds of people, then thousands. Then it was 10,000.
They came to her home in West Reading, Pennsylvania, and even though she was too weak to go to the window, she heard the wonderful music.
“I can hear you now!!! Love you!” she said through a photo her family posted to a Team Laney Facebook page showing the girl, two thumbs up despite a breathing mask, lying in bed.
Laney was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia seven months ago. Last week doctors told her family that she has 70% cancer cells in her blood. She came home from the hospital on Thursday and said she wanted to hear Christmas carols.
So two days later people came from all over. Her dance team was there to honor her through one last number. Even Santa showed up.
Many of them held back tears.
“I can’t even express how I feel,” Krysta Rebe, who has a daughter Laney’s age, told WFMZ.
It was only an hour of singing, but it lifted the spirits of everyone who jammed the block outside the Browns’ home.
On Facebook one woman wrote that she had seen and taken part in a miracle.
“As much as I want that miracle to be saving the life of an 8-year-old little girl, Laney, the miracle was an 8-year-old little girl teaching an entire community, town, city and the whole country the true meaning of Christmas,” Marianne Franken wrote.
Laney’s parents issued a statement Thursday thanking the public for its support and asking for privacy in the difficult days ahead.
The-CNN-Wire
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