Yesterday, when I heard that Dolly Parton had died, I posted three words on Facebook:
“I am devastated.”
The words came before any attempt to explain them. I had never met Dolly Parton. I did not know her, and yet the news felt like a genuine loss. I grew up listening to her music. I love 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias. One of the last trips I took with my father included a day at Dollywood. Dolly Parton is woven into memories from different seasons of my life, some of which have very little to do with country music.
Perhaps that is why the death of a beloved public figure can surprise us with the depth of our response. We know perfectly well that we did not know them personally, but somehow, over the years, they became part of the landscape of our lives.
There is a name for some of what we are experiencing: public grief, the shared sorrow experienced by a community or society following a widespread tragedy or the death of a public figure. Related to it is what researchers call parasocial grief: grief arising from the loss of someone with whom we had a one-sided relationship.
One-sided, however, does not mean meaningless. A singer does not know who is listening when a particular song becomes the soundtrack to someone’s first love, divorce, deployment, grief, or long drive home. An actor does not know which family watches the same movie together year after year. A public figure cannot possibly know all the memories that accumulate around a lifetime spent in public, but we know those memories because they belong to us.
One man responding online to news of Dolly’s death wrote that he had awakened expecting an ordinary day and suddenly found himself unprepared to say goodbye to Dolly. Others wrote of growing up listening to her. One woman said that every time she watched another video about Dolly, she cried.
Perhaps we are not only grieving Dolly. When someone who has accompanied us for decades dies, we can also find ourselves grieving the years through which they accompanied us. A song transports us to a childhood kitchen. A movie reminds us of someone with whom we first watched it. A place brings back someone we love who is no longer here.
Dolly’s death takes me back to Dollywood and one of those last trips with my father. Grief has a way of doing that. One loss brushes against another, opening doors in memory we did not know were still unlocked.
Yet I think there is something more happening in the extraordinary response to Dolly Parton’s death. Plenty of people become famous. Far fewer become beloved, and Dolly was beloved.
There was always more to Dolly than a memorable physique and a blond wig. Much more. She was wonderfully self-aware about the character she had created, once describing herself this way: “I look totally artificial but I’m totally real.” The blond hair, rhinestones, makeup, curves and larger-than-life persona made Dolly Parton recognizable. They weren’t what made her beloved.
People discovered the woman beneath them.
She grew up poor in the mountains of East Tennessee, one of twelve children. Her father could neither read nor write, an experience that eventually inspired the Imagination Library. What began in her home county in 1995 grew into an international literacy effort that has put hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children.
When wildfires devastated Sevier County in 2016, Dolly showed up. Her My People Fund provided direct financial assistance to families who had lost their homes. When Hurricane Helene devastated parts of Appalachia in 2024, she showed up again, committing $1 million personally while her businesses and foundation added another $1 million.
When COVID arrived, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for research that contributed to the development of Moderna’s vaccine. There were also gifts for pediatric cancer care and infectious-disease research, scholarships and other educational programs. Her generosity was not confined to one cause because, apparently, neither was her capacity to notice when someone needed help.
When Dolly received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, she described her approach without constructing a grand theory of giving: “I just give from my heart.” She explained that when she saw a need she could fill, she tried to fill it. That may be as good a description of Dolly Parton as any.
Her generosity also extended beyond money. Dolly was a woman of deep Christian faith who nevertheless—or perhaps consequently—resisted the temptation to appoint herself judge of everybody else. She stood with LGBTQ+ people, supported marriage equality, and repeatedly insisted upon people’s right to be themselves. After her death, GLAAD remembered decades of support that had made her a particularly beloved figure within the LGBTQ+ community.
During the national reckoning over race in 2020, Dolly was characteristically direct:
“Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”
She went on to say that everybody matters and that Christians, of all people, should understand that judging one another is not our job: “God is the judge, not us.”
That combination matters. Dolly repeatedly resisted being claimed by partisan politics, but her nonpartisanship should never be confused with having no convictions. She had plenty of them. What she seemed unwilling to do was allow partisan identity to determine whom she was permitted to care about.
There may be something worth recovering there. We live in a time when we are increasingly encouraged to divide humanity into camps before deciding how we will treat one another: Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, gay or straight, religious or secular, rural or urban. Dolly managed to hold convictions without requiring enemies.
Perhaps that helps explain the breadth of the grief following her death. President Donald Trump ordered American flags lowered in her honor, calling her death “a true loss for millions of people.” GLAAD mourned a longtime LGBTQ+ ally. Hillary Clinton remembered her enormous heart. Jane Fonda said she was “devastated.” Republican members of Congress mourned her alongside progressive activists, musicians, actors, educators and ordinary people around the world.
Back home, the grief is more intimate. Sevier County declared August 26 a Day of Mourning. Officials called Dolly “one of our own” and remembered the international superstar as “a beloved friend” and “an extraordinary neighbor.” Nearby Sevierville mourned not simply an icon but “a daughter who never stopped loving her home.”
People have gathered at Dolly’s statue outside the Sevier County Courthouse, leaving flowers and butterfly balloons. Parents have brought children. Schools have encouraged students to wear pink and purple. Dollywood itself opened the morning after her death because, according to a spokesperson, that was what Dolly would have wanted. “The show must go on.”
These are rituals of mourning. Some are official, some spontaneous, some intensely personal. Together they remind us that public grief need not be dismissed as celebrity worship. The relationship may have been one-sided, but the meaning was not. The memories are real. The music was real. The movie we watched with someone we loved was real. The book that arrived in a child’s mailbox was real. The family that received help after a wildfire was real. The person who had been told that God could not possibly love someone like them hearing Dolly insist otherwise—that mattered too.
We do not need to apologize because the death of someone we never met brought tears. Grief follows attachment and meaning, not rules about whose death we are entitled to mourn.
But grief also presents us with a choice. We can remember Dolly, tell stories, play the songs, watch the movies and laugh again at the hair and rhinestones. Or we can allow the life we are mourning to ask something of ours.
One person commenting on Dolly’s death put it beautifully: “Let’s take a lesson from her and be kinder people.”
How can we be more Dolly?
Most of us cannot donate a million dollars to vaccine research. We cannot create a literacy program that sends hundreds of millions of books around the world, and we don’t have theme parks, recording contracts or international platforms. But we can notice the person in front of us. We can see a need and ask whether there is something we can do.
We can put a book in a child’s hands. We can help a neighbor who is struggling. We can show up when our community hurts. We can welcome someone who has been told they don’t belong. We can hold convictions without contempt and refuse to allow politics to determine whom we will love. We can remember where we came from, give from what we have, laugh at ourselves, and perhaps simply try to leave the corner of the world entrusted to us a little kinder than we found it.
The world seems a little darker today, but perhaps the best response to that darkness is not simply to mourn the light that has gone out. Perhaps it is to carry some of that light ourselves.
Dolly Parton spent a lifetime singing about love. More importantly, she spent a lifetime trying to practice it. She saw needs and, when she could, she filled them. She used what had been entrusted to her not simply to build a remarkable life for herself, but to make life a little better for countless people she would never meet.
Perhaps there is only one thing left to say:
“Well done, good and faithful servant.”
Matthew 25:23
