Dolly Parton has passed away at the age of 80, and tonight the world feels a little colder, a little quieter, a little less kind without her in it, because some people do more than simply live among us, they soften the place by being here, and Dolly spent eighty years pouring warmth and wit and goodness into a world that has never had enough of any of them.
And I’m fifty-two years old, sitting here crying over her death because some tender little piece of me had filed Dolly Parton under permanent, and tonight I’m being reminded that nothing is.
I have Steel Magnolias playing while I write this, my favorite movie of all time, and every time Dolly appears as Truvy, all towering hair and lacquered nails and that warm Tennessee voice pouring out of her, I feel the loss all over again because I have watched this movie more times than I could possibly count. I know those women. I know that beauty shop. I know the rhythm of those conversations. Dolly has always been there when I came back to it, alive and laughing and luminous.
And now she isn’t.
God, I hate writing that.
Dolly has been threaded through my life since I was a little girl, not because I knew her, I didn’t, but because certain people become part of your memories so quietly and completely that you don’t realize how much of your own history has gathered around them until they are no longer here.
She was in the movies I loved, the songs coming through the radio, the television playing in the house. She was “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors” and the unmistakable first notes of “9 to 5,” which has been my go-to karaoke song for years and which I have attacked with vastly more enthusiasm than musical ability in bars full of innocent people who did nothing to deserve it.
That laugh.
That accent.
That hair that seemed to begin somewhere near sea level and continue until it encountered commercial airspace.
All those little unmistakable pieces of her had been there for so long that I stopped thinking of them as things I could lose, and that is one of the crueler lessons of getting older: the people you unconsciously assumed would always be somewhere in the world begin disappearing, and parts of your own life suddenly become places you can revisit in memory but can never actually return to.
Tonight Dolly belongs to so many versions of me at once, the little girl watching her on television, the grown woman laughing at Truvy, the idiot at karaoke lunging for the microphone the second those opening notes hit.
She was there for all of them.
For all the hair and makeup and sequins and acrylic nails and augmentation she discussed with more honesty and humor than most people can manage discussing a bad haircut, Dolly Parton was one of the most genuine spirits I have ever seen.
And God, I loved that about her, because for all the spectacle, all the sparkle, all the deliberate excess, Dolly never felt fake for one fucking second.
She knew exactly what she looked like.
She knew exactly what people assumed about her because of it.
And she was always ten steps ahead of them.
She was fearless and funny and ferociously intelligent, able to laugh at herself without ever diminishing herself, and she understood something far too many people never learn: confidence does not require cruelty, wit does not require a victim, and shining brightly does not mean you have to dim everybody standing beside you.
Dolly never punched down.
She never needed somebody else’s humiliation to make her point.
And let’s be real, Dolly Parton was a better human being than I will ever be.
I know what anger feels like in my body. I know what happens inside me when somebody powerful deliberately hurts somebody vulnerable. I reach for fury. I reach for language. I want the person causing the pain to feel some fraction of what they have inflicted on everybody else.
Dolly found another way.
She was deeply religious, but faith never seemed to give her permission to police another person’s soul. When people asked her about the LGBTQ community, she talked about loving people and leaving judgment to God.
Live your life.
Love who you love.
Be who you are.
God can handle God’s job.
I admire the fuck out of that.
Because Dolly was nobody’s fool. She understood sexism, exploitation, grief, rejection, condescension, and what it felt like to have people decide who you were before you had even opened your mouth. She had every reason to become cynical.
She didn’t.
She could face ugliness without absorbing it into herself. She could resist without dehumanizing, disagree without despising, and make her point without requiring another person to become smaller so the point could feel bigger.
She used music.
She used humor.
She used generosity.
She kept turning outward.
Her father couldn’t read, so she created the Imagination Library and put books into the hands of children by the millions.
That tells me more about her than any list of awards ever could.
She knew what it meant for something essential to be missing, and when she had the power to fill that absence for someone else, she did.
No grand pronouncement.
Just a child opening a mailbox and finding a book with their name on it.
We are living in a brutally bleak moment, one where cruelty is rewarded and amplified, contempt is treated like strength, and dehumanization has become far too ordinary. Dolly offered a completely different answer to all of it.
She was joy incarnate.
Not foolish joy.
Not joy untouched by pain.
Joy that knew exactly how hard life could be and refused to surrender itself anyway.
That is courage to me.
And we need more of it.
More, not less.
Just this past January, on her 80th birthday, Dolly released a new version of “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” with proceeds helping pediatric cancer research, because even a milestone that was entirely hers became another chance to give something away.
She said she wanted to “shine a little light forward.”
I cannot stop thinking about that tonight.
Because that is what she did.
She sent it ahead of her into lives she would never know she touched, into working women who heard themselves inside her songs, into people nursing broken hearts, into LGBTQ kids who heard a deeply religious woman tell them they were loved instead of condemned, into people who needed a laugh, a lyric, a little permission to be completely themselves.
And some of that light reached me too, quietly and repeatedly, across decades I wasn’t measuring at the time, until tonight I find myself back in front of Steel Magnolias, watching Truvy move around that beauty shop exactly as she always has, while the woman who gave her that laugh, that warmth and that glorious spark is no longer somewhere in the world.
Dolly once said, “We can’t let the darkness win.”
God, I wish she were still here helping us keep it from doing exactly that.
But I know Carl is waiting for her, and I just hope she knows how deeply she was loved.
I hope all the love she spent eighty years giving away found its way back to her before she left us, through every letter, every story, every hand she held, every person who told her that one of her songs carried them through something, that one of her jokes made a terrible day easier, that her kindness mattered, that her example mattered, that she mattered.
Thank you, Dolly.
For Truvy.
For “9 to 5.”
For the laughter and the songs and the outrageous hair and the dirty jokes and the tenderness beneath all that sparkle.
For refusing to let this hard world harden you.
For being something truly, stubbornly good in a world that desperately needs good things.
The world is less beautiful without you.
But because you were here, it will always be kinder than it might have been.
And we will always love you.
And with that, today’s song:
Rest in Peace, Dolly. ✨
And for everybody else, stay safe out there, stay strong, and stay connected to each other.
💙 Jo
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