On losing a woman I never met, but somehow always knew.
We Were All Dolly’s Children
On losing a woman I never met, but somehow always knew — from the little girl singing her songs to the grandmother still opening Dolly’s books with another generation.
I have vivid memory of pretending to be asleep, listening to adults talk and hearing some of the men in my life joke about Dolly Parton’s, ahem, “knockers.”
That was probably my first understanding of Dolly.
Big hair. Big boobs. Rhinestones. That tiny waist. That voice.
I was too young to understand that the woman being reduced to a punchline was one of the greatest songwriters of her generation. I didn’t yet understand that underneath all that hair and sparkle was a woman who had taken everything the world might use to underestimate her and somehow turned it into armor.
I just knew Dolly.
Everybody knew Dolly.
And then I grew up.
Dolly Through My Life
Then I Started Listening
At some point, I stopped merely hearing her music and started listening to it.
I began to understand why there is simply no mistaking that voice. Lots of people can sing beautifully. Lots of people can sing country music. But nobody sounds like Dolly Parton.
That little Appalachian flutter. The sweetness and ache woven together. The way she could sound fragile and absolutely unbreakable in the same line.
It belonged only to her.
Someone doesn’t have to know you to accompany you through your life.
Then I discovered the songwriter.
Jolene.
Coat of Many Colors.
I Will Always Love You.
Songs so familiar they can almost disappear into American culture, until you actually stop and think about the woman who sat down and wrote them.
And suddenly Dolly wasn’t the blonde woman the grown men joked about when I was a kid.
She was an artist.
The Girl She Never Left Behind
Then I learned her story.
One of twelve children. Dirt-poor in the mountains of East Tennessee. A childhood where money was scarce but music, faith, family and storytelling were abundant.
And somehow that little girl became Dolly Parton.
Not by shedding where she came from, but by carrying it with her.
She sang about poverty without romanticizing it. She could tell you a coat was stitched together from scraps and somehow make you understand that something does not have to be expensive to be priceless.
Maybe that is one of the reasons people loved her so much.
Dolly never seemed embarrassed by the girl she had been.
She brought her along.
The poverty. The mountains. Her mama. Her daddy. The hand-me-downs. The church songs. The people who laughed. The people who loved her.
She took all of them with her.
And as I got older, my affection for Dolly became admiration.
Then Motherhood Added Another Layer
When my children were little, I enrolled them in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.
Years later, when my grandchildren came along, I did it again.
Every month, another book.
A child’s own name printed on the package.
A little piece of possibility arriving in the mailbox because a woman from the mountains believed books could change the trajectory of a child’s life.
Dolly never had biological children.
But maybe that was one of the most extraordinary things about her life.
Because weren’t we all, in some strange way, Dolly’s children?
Our kids certainly were.
Millions of them opened books because of her.
Millions heard stories before they could read them themselves.
Parents curled up beside toddlers with books that arrived because Dolly Parton remembered a father she adored who had never learned to read.
What an incredible way to love your daddy.
What an incredible way to mother the world.
Then Came Dollywood
My close friend Angeles was moving from Texas to New Hampshire, and somehow I found myself on one of those enormous, ridiculous, wonderful road trips you remember forever.
We needed to get from Texas to New Hampshire.
Naturally, we decided Tennessee and Dollywood were on the way.
Or close enough.
For days, Dolly rode with us.
Her music filled the car mile after mile as we drove north. We sang. We talked. We laughed. We listened.
And then we went to Dollywood.
There was something unexpectedly emotional about being there.
Dolly had become fabulously wealthy and internationally famous, and what had she done with that success?
She went home.
She built something in the mountains.
She created jobs there. She celebrated the music and people and traditions of the place that made her. She could have spent the rest of her life distancing herself from poverty, but instead she kept pointing back toward those hills and saying, essentially:
This is where I come from.
These are my people.
Don’t overlook them.
By the time I left Dollywood, apparently I had become so inspired that before I even made it back to New Hampshire, I ordered myself a banjo.
Because of course I did.
It turned out to be one of my better impulsive purchases.
A few months later, COVID shut the world down, and there I was with a banjo.
Dolly had somehow sent me home from Tennessee prepared for quarantine.
Even now, that makes me laugh.
Never Mistake Softness for Stupidity
And Dolly always made us laugh.
She could tell the joke about herself before anyone else could. She understood exactly what people saw when they looked at her, exaggerated it by about 40 percent, covered it in rhinestones and then went to the bank.
There was something profoundly intelligent about that.
Never mistake softness for stupidity.
Never mistake femininity for weakness.
Never mistake an accent for ignorance.
Never assume the blonde woman with the enormous hair doesn’t know exactly what she is doing.
Oh, Jolene
Some of us have played Jolene through every jealous moment we’ve had since adolescence.
Dolly understood something about women that songwriters sometimes miss: jealousy isn’t always rage.
Sometimes it is vulnerability.
Sometimes another woman’s beauty makes you suddenly aware of every insecurity you’ve ever carried.
Dolly wrote that feeling down.
Kenny, Miley and the Dolly We All Wanted to Know
Then there was Kenny Rogers.
I once saw Kenny perform at a fair in Oxford, Maine almost by accident, and he was wonderful.
But some ridiculous little part of me kept hoping Dolly might appear.
Because Kenny without Dolly always left room in my imagination for Islands in the Stream.
Surely she could just pop up in Oxford, Maine, right?
She did not.
I remained mildly disappointed.
And then there was Miley Cyrus.
I have spent years being completely rational and mature about the fact that Miley got Dolly for a godmother.
Which is to say:
I was wildly jealous.
Imagine having access to Dolly Parton not as an icon on a television screen or a voice coming through your speakers, but as Aunt Dolly.
Imagine being able to call her.
To ask her advice.
To have that woman cheering for you.
But perhaps that is the secret of Dolly’s appeal.
She somehow made millions of us feel like she was cheering for us, too.
She Belonged to Everyone
Men who once joked about her body ended up singing her songs.
Republicans loved Dolly.
Democrats loved Dolly.
People who cannot agree on almost anything in America could generally agree on Dolly Parton.
That feels increasingly miraculous.
She rarely lectured us.
She simply lived her values where everyone could see them.
Give people dignity.
Help children.
Remember where you came from.
Work hard.
Laugh at yourself.
Love people.
And when you have more than you need, send some of it back down the mountain.
And Then There Was Carl
And, of course, there was Carl.
Most of us hardly knew Carl Dean at all.
That was exactly how he wanted it.
While his wife became one of the most recognizable women on the planet, Carl stayed mostly out of sight. Nearly sixty years of marriage unfolded largely beyond the cameras, beyond the red carpets and beyond the spectacle of Dolly Parton.
But we knew he was there.
We knew because she knew he was there.
And I think we all loved Carl, in some strange secondhand way, because we loved Dolly.
More than that, we loved him because he loved her.
He loved the woman underneath all of it—the wigs and rhinestones, the songs and tours, the Dollywood billboards, the jokes, the fame, the enormous personality the rest of the world thought belonged partly to us.
She belonged to everybody.
But she went home to Carl.
We loved Carl because we loved her. And because, for nearly sixty years, he loved the woman we all loved too.
When Carl died in March 2025, I was in a season of my own life where emotions were already living very close to the surface.
My daughter and I were still navigating the long aftermath of the necrotizing fasciitis that had nearly taken her life.
There were appointments.
So many appointments.
Doctors, specialists, follow-ups—the strange new normal that comes after surviving something you never imagined surviving in the first place.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, Dolly lost Carl.
Then she released If You Hadn’t Been There.
I could not listen to it without crying.
My daughter discovered this almost immediately.
Which, naturally, meant she would teasingly turn it on in the car.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
I would protest.
She would play it anyway.
And I would listen.
Because apparently I was physically incapable of turning off a Dolly Parton song just because it broke my heart.
So there we were, driving from appointment to appointment after coming frighteningly close to losing my daughter, listening to another woman sing from inside the fresh absence of the man she had loved almost her entire adult life.
Of course I cried.
How could I not?
There was something about Dolly and Carl that felt almost rebellious in its longevity.
Not because they presented some polished, fairy-tale version of marriage.
In fact, perhaps the opposite.
She was flamboyant. He was private.
She loved the spotlight. He wanted almost nothing to do with it.
She traveled the world. He preferred home.
And somehow they kept choosing one another.
Year after year.
Decade after decade.
Nearly sixty years.
We tend to talk about Dolly’s resilience in terms of poverty and ambition—this little girl from the mountains who became one of the most successful entertainers in the world.
But there was another kind of resilience we watched more recently.
We watched a woman learn how to wake up in a world where Carl wasn’t in it.
For all her strength, all her faith, all those decades of learning how to keep smiling through whatever life handed her, that loss seemed different.
How could it not be?
He had been there before almost everything else.
Before the awards.
Before Dollywood.
Before the millions of books.
Before the woman became an icon.
There was Carl.
And when he was gone, Dolly did what Dolly had always done.
She made something from the hurt.
She wrote it down.
She put a melody around it.
And then she handed it to the rest of us.
Maybe that was always her greatest gift: Dolly could take something deeply personal—a childhood, a heartbreak, a jealousy, a goodbye—and somehow leave room inside it for the rest of us.
So my daughter teased me with that song.
And I cried every single time.
But looking back now, I think there was something strangely beautiful about those drives.
My daughter was still here.
I was still here.
Dolly was still here.
And we were listening to her tell us what it meant when someone who had always been there suddenly wasn’t.
I understood her heartbreak then.
I understand it differently now.
Yesterday, My Phone Lit Up
Yesterday, my phone lit up with the alert that Dolly Parton had died.
And I just stared at it.
I was genuinely at a loss for words.
My heart hurt.
Which is strange when you think about it.
I never met Dolly Parton.
She never knew my name.
She didn’t know that a little girl in New Hampshire grew up listening to her music.
She didn’t know that girl eventually understood the brilliance hidden underneath all those jokes about her breasts.
She didn’t know I sang Jolene dramatically during jealous moments.
She didn’t know I drove across the country with one of my closest friends listening to her music.
She didn’t know I went to Dollywood.
She didn’t know she inspired me to buy a banjo.
She didn’t know that banjo would help entertain me when the entire world shut down a few months later.
She didn’t know I put my children into her book program.
She didn’t know I would someday do exactly the same thing for my grandchildren.
She didn’t know that when she lost Carl and put that heartbreak into a song, my daughter and I carried it with us from appointment to appointment.
But isn’t that the astonishing thing about art?
Someone doesn’t have to know you to accompany you through your life.
Betty White felt that way too.
There are certain people who become fixtures in the American landscape.
They are simply there.
Year after year.
Decade after decade.
You don’t spend much time imagining a world without them because they seem almost permanent.
Until suddenly they aren’t.
And the grief is real.
Not the grief of losing your mother or sister or best friend, obviously.
Something different.
It is the grief of losing a landmark.
Something that helped orient you in the world is gone.
Dolly Parton was one of those landmarks.
She Represented Possibility
- A poor little girl could become a songwriter.
- A songwriter could become a businesswoman.
- A woman famous for her body could make damn sure history remembered her brain.
- A child who grew up without much could spend her adulthood making sure millions of other children had books.
- A person could become enormously successful without pretending she had created herself from nothing.
- And perhaps you could grow older without growing harder.
That’s the part I admired most.
Dolly survived poverty, ridicule, sexism, heartbreak, an unforgiving entertainment industry, decades of scrutiny and the peculiar burden of becoming a symbol instead of merely a person.
And somehow she kept her tenderness.
She remained funny.
She remained generous.
She remained curious.
She remained Dolly.
We Will Always Love You
She wrote I Will Always Love You decades ago as a goodbye.
Today it feels less like one.
Because how exactly do we say goodbye to someone whose voice is still going to come through the speakers?
Whose songs will still be sung by women who haven’t even been born yet?
Whose books will still arrive in mailboxes?
Whose mountains will still carry her name and story?
Whose example will keep whispering to poor kids from overlooked places that where they start does not dictate where they finish?
Dolly once said she wanted the old gospel hymn If We Never Meet Again at her funeral.
There is something almost unbearably fitting about that now.
Because millions of us never met her the first time.
Not really.
And yet somehow she was there.
Maybe Dolly didn’t have children of her own.
Maybe she had something bigger.
She had us.
The little girls who grew up.
The mothers who ordered the books.
The grandmothers who ordered them again.
The musicians.
The dreamers.
The mountain people.
The misfits.
The women who were underestimated.
The people trying to make something beautiful out of scraps.
A great big coat of many colors, stitched across generations.
