A custom birthday song for Sheila

[0:01] Hello, my name is Michael Karoo and I made the song Jewel of Emerald Hill, made for my mother who was 93 and who stays in a care home in Australia that is called Emerald Hill. [0:15] Did I have doubts about it? For sure. [0:17] I saw it advertised on Facebook and I really thought this could be a scam and I could lose all of my money. [0:24] I don't have a lot of money. [0:25] I'm a missionary volunteer. [0:27] I don't work with US dollars. [0:29] I work with an African currency and I thought I might lose all my money, I just wasn't sure. [0:35] So anyway, why did I do it? [0:38] I thought it was worth the risk because I thought if this goes well then I'm going to give my mother perhaps the best gift I've ever given her in her life and this is going to be healing between me and my mother and possibly between me and my six brothers and sisters because there's been a lot of fallings out. [0:58] So I went ahead with it and I thought if I lose this, okay, I lost some money, but I if if this goes well then the money's not important. [1:08] What's important is my mother and me telling her how much I love her and appreciate her. [1:16] That's why I did it. [1:17] What happened when they heard it? Well, let me tell you what happened. [1:20] First of all I heard it when you sent it back to me and I couldn't stop crying. [1:23] [crying] [1:23] I kept listening to it and listening to it and listening to it. [1:26] I didn't know it would be so powerful and so healing just for myself. [1:30] I then decided that I couldn't give it to my mother by myself because I had six brothers and sisters and I thought if this goes really well, there could be some resentments because once I've done it, no one else can really follow up and do a second one. [1:44] It won't have the same impact. [1:46] So I sent it to my oldest sister. [1:48] She cried her eyes out and then she said, "I want to come in on it and be part of getting it to her for her birthday." [1:54] I sent it to another sister, she absolutely refused and said, "No, because mom has dementia, she's going to be really mean now." [2:01] She couldn't get past the meanness, so she said, "No." She listened to two lines and said, "Absolutely not, I can't reconcile myself to the words of this song." [2:09] I sent it to my brother who doesn't really talk to me. [2:12] He said, "Good job, I'm going to come in on it." [2:15] I sent it to another sister, she cried and cried, came in on it. [2:19] Another sister was asked by someone else, "Would you come in on it?" She said, "Absolutely not." [2:24] She doesn't like my mother the way she is. [2:27] I rang her up myself to just check and said, "Look, it's not about her now with dementia, it's about her before she had dementia, when she was really lovely and it's about her life before she got dementia." [2:38] And I said, "Would you at least listen to it?" She said, "Yes." [2:42] And then she, I sent it to her from here, she rang back 5 minutes later and said, "I'm in." [2:47] So I had five siblings in it now and the other two refused. [2:52] So the five of us gave it to her. [2:56] And it really all of us, the five, all said this is such a healing experience for us to heal our hearts from a lot of hurt. [3:05] What happened when my mom heard it? Well, I talked about what happened when we all heard it. [3:11] What happened on my mom's birthday was that I said, "I couldn't be there because I'm in Africa," but I asked my oldest sister to take it to her. [3:18] And then I said, "Don't do it on her birthday because it'll eclipse every other gift and she might just go on about the song and offend people who gave her flowers and visits and things like that." [3:29] So what happened was we didn't give it to her on her birthday. [3:33] As it worked out, on her birthday she wasn't mentally okay, she couldn't comprehend what was going on. [3:40] She didn't understand really what was going on with her birthday, what flowers were coming in, she couldn't acknowledge it or understand that. [3:47] And so, that that that was her birthday was a blur, she was in terrible condition. [3:54] I was glad we didn't even try to give her the song that day, she wouldn't have understood it or known we even acknowledged that it was there. [4:01] So we went, my sister went a week later and that day she was switched on. [4:06] She was emotionally and mentally switched on and so when my sister played the song to her, mom really responded really positively. [4:14] My sister said, "Well, Michael's done it," so that was a real plus for me. [4:19] And really bridged something between me and my mother. [4:23] I wanted to do it because as I said before, she might not make it to 94 and I might see her so I thought this would be a big regret if I don't do it. [4:31] Her initial response was, interestingly enough, "Who sang this song and who wrote it?" She didn't know it was AI or she didn't know the technology was there to do this. [4:42] So she thought that we got somebody, a singer and a real live singer in Australia that we took them into a studio and we wrote the song and that we recorded it because we're kind of a musical family. [4:55] So she was asking, "Okay, who did you get and who wrote the song and who's singing it and all this stuff?" [5:02] And then my sister tried to explain to her, "No, no, no, Mom, it's" - she couldn't really explain to her - she just said, "Mom, just listen to it, it's it's a song about you for you," and she said, "Michael explain to you later." [5:13] Anyway, she did say once she started concentrating on the song a little bit, after she asked all these questions, she said, "Oh, I want to cry." She never cries. [5:21] She never cries, my mom. She wanted to cry. [5:25] Then she got a little bit distracted at times, but I think she deliberately did that not to cry. She was so touched by it. [5:31] At the end, as soon as the song finished, my mother rang me here in Africa. [5:36] She was so excited about it, she asked me a lot of questions, and it was just a real healing thing between me and my mother. [5:42] Then she said, "I'm not going to do anything else today with appointments or people. I'm going to just listen to this song continuously for the whole rest of the day. I want to listen to this song," send it to her sister who's about 91 who was mentioned in the song as well. [5:58] Then what I had done, because the song is based on a words that I had put on the performer, some of the it's such a summary of her life, I mean to say, to keep her legacy in in 5 minutes of song is pretty hard. [6:15] So some of the concepts were just covered by one word. [6:19] For example, for all the time when we were growing up and even in her oldies, every birthday and there was 30 people in the extended family, she would every year make those 30 cakes at the right time, put candles on them and and sing and wish us a happy birthday and she did that every year, 30 times every year. [6:40] So the candles, that's what the candles was about, but I thought the song only talks - it just says "candles" in one part of the one of the lines. [6:47] So I wrote four pages of notes to explain what every word meant to fill in the whole legacy and the whole meaning of the song. [6:55] So she want to get that frame - I don't know if she's done that yet - she wanted to put that on the wall in the room where she is in the care place to have those notes. [7:04] She was so touched by it. [7:07] What would I say to people who are hesitating? After my experience and after the fact that it wasn't a scam, and I I probably now that I've heard, I would have paid more money for that to be honest, because of the value it is to me into my family for the healing that it brought to so many of our hearts and for the pleasure that it gave to my mother. [7:30] Because she was on a high for about a week and she still talks about that song. [7:35] I would say just do it because it's one of the greatest things that you can give to somebody. [7:40] Music is such a powerful medium and if you want to show the appreciation and the honor and the love for somebody, this is such a great way to do it. [7:49] It's one of the most powerful ways that you can do it. [7:52] I actually think now that you can't go wrong with it because you're you're writing beautiful things about this person and they're going to be touched one way or another, no matter how they show it or they don't show it emotionally at the time. [8:05] It's going to go deep into their hearts and it's going to have an incredible effect. [8:10] And I would just say to people, just just go ahead and do it while you have the opportunity, well, for me, while I had the opportunity with my my mother being so old, don't hesitate, don't don't lose the opportunity. [8:23] And don't wait because someone else might do it, and if someone else does it before you, then the impact of getting a song a second time won't nearly be as strong as getting the surprise of a song like that for the first time. [8:35] So that's my story and and that's what happened and that's the healing that it brought to our family and I gotta say, I'm so happy and so blessed by how this song turned out. [8:48] So God bless you and thank you for the care and that that the touch that you put into it. [8:53] I know it wasn't all AI, AI can't be that personal and warm and it would make mistakes. [8:59] So I know that whatever system you use with AI, that someone has looked at that song, someone has checked it, someone has tweaked it. [9:07] I paid to have the song changed if there was any problem with it. [9:11] There was nothing wrong with it, it was perfect, it just made me cry. [9:14] There was no way I was sending it back to you guys to change anything in it. [9:17] It was just perfect. [9:18] So thank you so much.