Dolly

I swear I’m working on the follow-up to Ismael. Not to give away the ending, but I’m not writing this from inside a whale or the bottom of the sea. I’ll give you that much.

It’s just that I keep crying about Dolly dying and I’m not really totally sure why. She lived a long and incredibly good life. It was her time. There was nothing shocking or too sudden about it, like with Prince or David Bowie or Princess Diana, other famous people whose deaths made me cry.

I eventually realized that it’s really the loss to country that has me so upset. We’re such a terrible, awful mess right now. Hate is rampaging across the land. Losing Dolly right now means losing a warrior for love.

I came of age in an America where public Christianity was cruel, personified by Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly and all the other “Moral Majority” folks. One of my favorite bumper stickers of the time was “The Moral Majority is neither.”

Dolly Parton helped me realize that there was another way to be Christian, a way that more closely aligned with what I understood Jesus to have said.

Andy Warhol interviewed her for his magazine, Interview, and said “You could be a great preacher.” She replied, “I am a great preacher.”

Like Mr. Rogers and RuPaul, she saw her career as a ministry, an opportunity to spread a message of radical love and acceptance. I am crying for the loss of that.

She was a Universal Mother figure. Among the many online posts about her death, someone wrote that she was the only true American saint. That’s a bit hyperbolic, but not that far from the truth. She lived in service to her God, even while she made jokes about her boobs

My hope is that our shared grief helps us focus and pivot, to strive to make America more like Dolly wanted it to be. She wished us joy and happiness, and we know that even in death, she will always love us.