My Heart, Larry Kruteck, Branigan's husband (m. 1978), was diagnosed with colon cancer. Branigan refused to accept the medical prognosis, and left the music industry to devote her attention to him. Branigan put Kruteck on herbal treatments, eventually nursing him full-time. Kruteck survived for another two and a half years and died on June 15, 1996, after which Branigan stopped performing. Branigan had official greatest hits collections released in South America, Japan, Germany, South Africa, and the U.S.; the U.S. collection was released in 1995. The 13-track The Best of Branigan included two newly recorded covers: "Show Me Heaven" (written by Maria McKee) and the Donna Summer hit "Dim All the Lights", which Branigan released in several remixes. On August 15, 1995, Branigan was a guest on the TV show Talking Food, hosted by Robin Leach and broadcast by the Food Network, and she promoted the album and sang "Dim All the Lights", before preparing her Summer Delight pasta dish on the show. In February 1996, she was selected to be part of the international jury at the , in Chile. Besides her duties as a jury member of this international musical competition, Branigan performed on February 16 on the main stage for an audience who enthusiastically sang her greatest hits. 2001–2004: Return to music In early 2001, Branigan's return to the stage was postponed, when she broke both of her femurs in a 10-foot fall from a ladder while she was hanging wisteria outside her three-bedroom lakeside home in Westchester County, New York, resulting in physical therapy for six months. In 2002, she performed twice as the "singing" Janis Joplin in the off-Broadway musical Love, Janis, before dropping out of the show. "I left Janis because the producers failed to file with Equity properly," she told the Sunday News in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. "I was sort of relieved. My voice isn't anything like Janis Joplin's, and there were 19 of her songs in the show." In later years she continued to record, and dated Tommy Bayiokos, the drummer in her band. Also in 2002, her second official US hits collection, The Essentials, was released, including the long out-of-print hit "I Found Someone". Death Branigan died in her sleep at her lodge in East Quogue, New York, on August 26, 2004, aged 52. The cause was attributed to a previously undiagnosed cerebral aneurysm. It was reported that she had been experiencing