Good Bye, Dolly: On grief, memory, and finding our way back to the people we love

There are celebrity deaths that are sad, and then there are losses that seem to stop everyone in their tracks.

Dolly Parton feels like the latter.

And as a therapist, I keep thinking about why.

Then it hit me. It’s not just Dolly herself. It’s the deeply personal things she became intertwined with.

Dolly became tangled up in our childhoods. Our families. Our hometowns. Road trips. Kitchens. Movies we’ve seen a hundred times. People we love. People we’ve lost. Versions of ourselves we haven’t visited in years.

Sometimes a person becomes a container for all of it without us even realizing it.

For me, Dolly Parton has always been tangled up with memories of my Nana.

My Nana was my favorite person in the whole world. She was my best friend, and when I was little, we did so much together. Most of it happened in a humble little ranch house in Matthews, North Carolina, where my Nana could rhinestone the hell out of an ordinary day.

She eventized everything.

A Shirley Temple movie meant spending hours curling my hair into ringlets so I could sing and dance along. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory meant a trip to the store for an unreasonable amount of candy and chocolate. And our fireplace hearth acted as a Broadway stage, with the two of us putting on a show.

Looking back, it makes sense that she loved the grandeur of Dolly Parton.

Like Dolly, my Nana grew up in real poverty and somehow made an enormous life out of very little. She only had the opportunity to go to school through eighth grade, but there was absolutely a showgirl in there somewhere. Had life given her different opportunities, I’m pretty sure she would have made her Broadway debut.

Nana understood the glamour of it all, too. She refused to leave the house without her hair done and a full face of makeup. Dolly famously joked that she even slept in her makeup because, if there were an emergency, she couldn’t very well show up not looking like Dolly.

And then there was Tennessee.

My Nana spent part of her life there, and she remembered that time with such warmth and fondness. She loved sharing those memories with me. Tennessee was a place she carried with her long after she left. There has always been that same mutual love between Dolly and Tennessee. Dolly belonged to Tennessee, and Tennessee proudly claimed Dolly as its own.

My Nana and Dolly shared a generosity, too.

For decades, my Nana gave to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital every single month. They would send her little stickers with photographs of children receiving treatment, and she covered the refrigerator with them. Rows and rows and rows of little faces, displayed almost like a yearbook. Children we had never met, whose lives mattered enough to my Nana that their faces had a place in her kitchen.

Dolly was in that kitchen, too, her unmistakable twang pouring out of an old radio with a hand dial. That kitchen was sacred territory during supper prep, and the guest list was pretty much me, Dolly, and maybe Patsy Cline.

Dolly’s movies were heavy in the Cooper Family VHS rotation. We watched 9 to 5, Straight Talk, Unlikely Angel, and especially Steel Magnolias.

When my Nana died, I reached for something Dolly had been part of to help me say goodbye. I delivered her eulogy on Christmas Eve with a sentiment from Steel Magnolias: that I would rather have a short amount of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.

I didn’t know as a little girl sitting beside my Nana watching that movie that one day I would use it to say goodbye to her.

When this happens. A movie stops being just a movie. A song stops being just a song. A kitchen isn’t just a kitchen. A little ranch house in Matthews isn’t just a house.

And sometimes another person becomes a container, too. Dolly Parton has been that for me.

When I see her, I see little pieces of my Nana reflected back. The glamour. The humor. The generosity. The ability to take an ordinary day and decide it deserved to be special.

And I know my experience isn’t unique. Many of us are grieving the people who first played us her songs, sat beside us during her movies, took us to Dollywood, or a simpler time in life when Dolly became ours.

But maybe the very thing that makes this loss hurt is also part of its gift.

When someone becomes woven into the fabric of our relationships, they leave us with another way to find our way back to the people we love.

One of Dolly’s greatest gifts to me is the connection I still have to my Nana through her life’s work. I haven’t had the heart yet to put on the records or stream the movies. But I know that someday I will. And when I do, I’ll get to be a little closer to my Nana again.

I hope somewhere in all of this, you get to find your person, too. Whoever lives in a Dolly song for you. Whoever is waiting in an old movie, a childhood memory, a kitchen, a car ride, or a place you haven’t visited in a while.

My Nana gave me Dolly.

And Dolly still gives me little pieces of my Nana.

Maybe that’s what we’re grieving when someone like Dolly dies. Not just the person herself, but all the relationships she lives in.

And maybe that’s also what she leaves us. A way back to them.

Goodbye, Dolly.

Thank you for giving us somewhere to keep the people we love.