By admin 
Ellen DeGeneres has paid tribute to Tayt Andersen, a frequent and much-loved child guest on her former daytime show who died on Friday at the age of 19, sharing a video remembrance and a brief message to his family as news of his death was announced on social media.
“We had a very special guest on the show several times, and his name is Tayt,” DeGeneres said in a clip posted to Instagram. “He thought that I was his girlfriend, so I told him that he was my boyfriend, which shocked my wife.
But he was a very special little human being, and just brought joy and life and laughter into every room that he was in. And I will miss him.” In a caption to the video she added, “I love you, Tayt. I love you, Chrissy. You touched so many lives.”
Andersen’s family said he died in the early hours of Sept. 26, writing in an announcement that he passed away peacefully “surrounded by the fierce love of his family.”
The statement, posted to his Instagram account, read in part: “Our hearts are absolutely shattered as we share the news we never wanted to write: Our sweet, strong warrior, Tayt, was released from his bodily prison early this morning, at 1:30 a.m. CT… While our souls feel shattered and lost by this unimaginable grief, we are so thankful that Tayt is finally free.
No more pain, no more appointments, no more treatments.” The family said he had been “so alert and responsive on Sunday,” but “after a long night, he finally found peace and drifted off to sleep around 4:00 a.m. Monday,” remaining asleep and unresponsive until he died on Friday morning.
They asked followers to “keep Chrissy, Tayt, and our family in your thoughts and prayers as we navigate this crushing grief.”
A devoted viewer who became a fixture on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” during hospital stays and recoveries, Andersen was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a severe congenital defect sometimes described as being born “with half a heart.”
His medical history included more than a dozen operations by his ninth birthday and a heart transplant at age 10. In his teens he developed post-transplant lymphoma, and in 2024, at 18, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer.
By June 2025, according to his family’s public updates and a fundraising page set up to assist with care, the cancer had spread to his pelvis, spine, abdomen, chest and neck. In the week before his death, loved ones said he “took a turn for the worse due to an infection” while already in a fragile state from treatment.
DeGeneres’s remembrance compiled clips from Andersen’s appearances, including segments that documented the role the program played in his long course of treatment. In one clip included in her video, his mother, Chrissy, explains how the show structured his days: “He will tell his doctors to go away until it’s over.
He will make his nurses watch her with him. And therapy has to be scheduled around Ellen.” In another, filmed around the time of his transplant, Andersen tells the host he is excited at the prospect of “a new heart,” prompting DeGeneres to answer, “There aren’t too many people I’ve met that have a heart as good as yours that you have now… You’re an amazing guy.
But if you wanna get a new heart, that’s okay with me.” The memorial video closes on a title card: “In loving memory of Tayt Andersen 10/4/05 – 9/26/25.”
Andersen first came to DeGeneres’s attention as a young boy in Rigby, Idaho, where his family said he watched the show religiously through surgeries, rehabilitation and routine visits, and told relatives he wanted to meet “my girlfriend, Ellen.”
He was invited on the program in early 2013 and returned several times over the years, including a visit in 2015 when he sat beside the host and said, “I got myself a new heart!” as he recovered from transplant.
The dynamic between the comedian and the child—built around his playful claim that they were a couple and her response dubbing him her “only boyfriend”—became a recurring thread in updates that followed his health and milestones.
His mother expressed gratitude for DeGeneres’s intervention and the lift it gave her son, saying the host’s attention often coincided with improvements in mood and resilience. “I gotta get better. I gotta go see my girlfriend.
I gotta go see Ellen,” she recalled him saying after the host first reached out, a moment the family described as shortening what could have been a prolonged hospitalization. Under DeGeneres’s Instagram tribute on Friday, Chrissy added a public note of thanks: “We love you so much. Thank you for being his girlfriend. You gave him so much strength.”
In a local interview over the weekend, his mother described Andersen as someone who “gave 100 percent to everything that he could” and insisted on checking on others even during his own treatments. “I am thankful I got to be his mom.
Everybody was his friend. Everybody loved him,” she said. She recalled that doctors initially told the family he would not survive more than a few hours after birth. “I think he did pretty good to make it to almost 20 with half a heart, getting a heart transplant and then getting one type of cancer and then getting this complete fluke of a cancer.”
Through setbacks, she said, he leaned on a line from one of his favorite films featuring DeGeneres’s character Dory: “Just keep swimming! It will be okay!”
The family said they had relocated from Idaho to the Dallas area in 2021 for specialized treatment and that Andersen graduated from high school in May 2025, a milestone his mother called “a big accomplishment” given the toll of his illnesses and the demands of care.
In announcing his death, relatives emphasized the care he received in his final days, recounting phone and video calls that allowed extended family to say goodbye, and small rituals they undertook—the handprint they made, the familiar movies they kept on—that were meant to preserve details of a short life that was nonetheless public to an unusual degree.
They asked for “grace” as they organized a celebration of life to be held at a later date.
Public updates about his medical journey describe a sequence that is familiar to transplant families and physicians: a lifesaving procedure in childhood followed by a risk of later complications linked to immunosuppression, among them post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorders, and, in Andersen’s case, a rare diagnosis of bladder cancer in late adolescence that ultimately spread.
Loved ones said earlier this year that oncology teams had narrowed goals to comfort when the disease advanced despite treatment, and they used a crowdfunding page to seek help with hospice equipment, mortgage payments and keepsakes to be made for family members. The same page has since been updated to help defray funeral costs.
The closeness between DeGeneres and Andersen was visible both on air and off. During stretches when he was weaker, the host sent him personal video messages, his mother has said, and show staff kept up with the family’s private updates between appearances.
DeGeneres acknowledged that intimacy in her tribute by returning to the running joke that had amused the child and, by her account, “shocked” her wife, Portia de Rossi. “He was a very special little human being,” she said, pausing as she fought back tears. “I will miss him.”
The family’s obituary-length Instagram post functioned as both notice and diary entry, cataloguing the last week of Andersen’s life and the atmosphere in the home as he declined. They wrote of a “long night” and of the calm that followed; of watching his favorite films and reading favorite stories; of handprints taken and FaceTime calls made so that relatives could speak to him one last time.
“There are truly no words to describe this pain,” they wrote. “We are just moving through this painful process, grateful for every moment we had with our amazing boy.”
Media outlets that have covered Andersen’s visits over the years have often emphasized the way his affection for the program became a tool in coping with pain and fear. In DeGeneres’s video, a clip from the show features his mother explaining how appointment times were moved to avoid conflicts with episodes and how nurses were asked to sit and watch with him while procedures waited.
The montage presented him as he was introduced to the audience in 2013, as a tiny child with a bright smile and an avowed crush on the host; as a transplant recipient, still slight but eager to announce “I got myself a new heart!”; and as a teenager, taller and occasionally frail, returning to a studio that had become attached to his story.
In the hours after DeGeneres’s post, tributes to Andersen gathered from viewers who had followed his journey, from nurses and technicians who said they had treated him, and from reporters who had interviewed the family over the past decade.
A local outlet that has chronicled his story since childhood reported that he died at home in Texas, surrounded by family, and that he “would have turned 20 next week.” The piece quoted his stepfather, Aric Becker, who wrote, “Our hearts are absolutely shattered,” and echoed the family’s description of a young man whose personality and persistence left a deep impression on those he met.
DeGeneres, 67, ended her message with a direct address to Andersen and to his mother and then stepped off camera as a sequence of images and clips rolled.
The edit included moments of small talk and jokes that had defined the relationship on air—a whispered aside, a stage-side hug, an exchange of “I love yous”—and the note that, for most viewers, confirmed the dates of his life.
For his family, the audience now includes those who knew him only as a child on television and those who followed more recent updates as the disease advanced; for the host, the farewell re-stated something that had become clear across a decade of sporadic visits: that a boy who first appeared because he loved a show had become, in public and private, part of her extended circle.
The family has indicated that further details about services will be shared later. In the meantime, the crowdfunding page linked in several reports remains active for those who wish to contribute.
Amid condolences on her post, DeGeneres received a reply from Chrissy—“Thank you for being his girlfriend”—and dozens of notes from viewers recalling episodes that had introduced Andersen to a national audience. “He touched so many lives,” the comedian wrote, revisiting a phrase that has followed the teenager since his first trips to Los Angeles.
The line has long been used as a simple measure of a public figure’s influence; in this case, it was applied to a high-school graduate from Idaho who had spent years learning to walk short distances again, to breathe without fatigue, to sit on a couch and tell a host that he was getting better.
In their notice of his death, Andersen’s family wrote that they were “grateful for every moment” they had with him and asked readers to “please give us grace during this time.”
DeGeneres’s video memorial, posted hours later, anchored the national response with a few sentences about a boy who had called her his girlfriend, who had measured time in episodes and commercial breaks, and who, by returning to the show after major procedures, had turned his own recoveries into television updates filled with applause.
The sequence ended, as memorial videos sometimes do, with white text on black, the dates and the name presented without commentary. The host, who had introduced him to millions, let the images and his mother’s words carry the final minutes.
