People pass away all the time. It is one of the unavoidable realities of life, a fate none of us can escape, even if we can still remember the flush of youth and energy when we felt, temporarily at least, invincible.
We are now tethered to an instantaneous and unbroken news cycle, where alerts jolt us out of whatever mindspace we were occupying and abruptly shift our attention to another place and time. Among the most frequent are announcements that someone has died, especially someone famous, or at least famous enough to us that they once occupied a prominent place in our consciousness and therefore our memories: an athlete we remember at the height of their vigor, a politician who dominated an earlier era, a musician whose music defined a chapter of our lives, an actor with whom we somehow felt connected.
Sometimes, by the time the alert arrives, the name on our screen, alongside a final age and a line of biography, belongs to someone we had almost forgotten. Or at least hadn’t thought about for a long while. Maybe they were much older. Maybe we knew they were sick. Maybe we were surprised to learn they had still been alive.
Other times, the announcement lands with a sense of shock or mourning. Often we are grieving not only the person, but a world that once was and that we once inhabited with them. The force of that feeling varies, of course, depending on what that person meant to us and what their death suddenly calls forth.
I remember many of these alerts taking my breath away for a moment, sometimes longer, plunging me into a daze of memory. But I am hard pressed to think of any that has hit me quite as hard as the one today.
Dolly Parton, dead at 80.
What a voice, so strong, so singular, so resonant. What a spirit, so open, so honest, so resilient. What a heart, so full, so humble, and so giving. What a loss, a rending of the fabric of empathy and grace that can help hold our world together, just when we need the humanity she embodied and celebrated more than ever.
There will be outpourings of testimonials, reminiscences, and days-long playlists across all the forms of media she once so effortlessly inhabited. We will undoubtedly hear from the legions of famous people who knew her, collaborated with her, and loved her just like the rest of us. But even more so, there will be a collective mourning welling up around the world from those to whom she spoke as few could, with humor, warmth, good-heartedness, and almost unfathomable talent.
She was an icon who both embodied and transcended the categories we use to try to explain that unexplainable confluence of human attributes we call art. She was also a savvy businesswoman whose strength was a hard lesson for anyone foolish enough to underestimate her.
I had the great fortune of meeting her once, in a room at Dollywood for an interview with Dan Rather. She was just as she appeared on camera and off: gracious, modest, hilarious, and very, very human.
That’s what made her so special. She seemed to vibrate with all that life could give, all that makes our dreams and aspirations worth pursuing, all that we can pack into our precarious time here.
And ultimately, that is the bargain we all make: our time is finite. Even for someone we wished could live forever.
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I have always felt there are few things more distinctly human than voices in harmony, so I leave you with one of my favorites among her many duets. It’s an obvious choice, I grant you, but there’s a reason.
Islands in the stream is what we all are.
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