Our friend M. Belanger shared this tribute to Dolly Parton with The Wild Hunt. Belanger (he/they) is a prolific author, performer, creator, and game designer. Since the 1990s, you’ve seen their work through Marvel AR, the History Channel, Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, Onyx Path, Nox Arcana, Osbourne Media, Llewellyn Books, Crossed Crow, Tenebrous Press, and their own imprints. The founder of House Kheperu, they have served the Pagan and vampire communities as clergy for over thirty years. More at xosh.carrd.co
How do you grieve for someone you have never met? They’re not family, not by blood or any of the other ways in which we calculate those bonds. And yet their life deeply impacted our own. This impact was not a mere symptom of their celebrity, but is something demonstrable. We have concrete proof that how they lived, the choices they made, every time they spoke out, they substantially improved our world – and our lives specifically.
I’m talking, of course, about Dolly Parton.
I write this late on the day after her death was announced. Like many, I’ve spent hours on social media reading the stories of people whose lives she changed – often indirectly, through her extensive philanthropy (the books distributed through her Imagination Library alone have – without hyperbole – changed the course of millions of lives). But frequently these stories are direct and intimate, like the case of the drag queen fighting the Texas ban. Dolly, like a living Saint, seems to have been everywhere there was need for her particular style of rhinestone-studded kindness.
When I went out later in the afternoon, every shop I stepped into was playing her music. There were already signs in windows, hand-lettered and heartfelt. A couple of telephone poles I passed by sported ribbons, a mylar balloon, a smiling photo printed out from an Internet post taped to a sheet of paper decorated with little silver stars. Everyone seemed touched by this.
I don’t think most of us expected it. I don’t mean her death. I mean this reaction to it.
For me, the news came early in my workday, and I was caught off guard by the intense immediacy of my grief. I wept, and that’s not something I do easily or often. And these were complicated tears because it felt like I was mourning more than the woman herself: I wept for a world that could no longer hold her. It felt like, in Dolly, we lost a load-bearing part of our culture, someone whose good works we may never fully fathom. And that loss hit with unexpected weight in this time when so many people with wealth, power, and influence use those things to do harm.
We’re drowning in those people. Their pettiness. Their greed. Yet here was Dolly, their opposite in every way: a queer ally from the jump; someone who spoke up in defense of trans people as early as 1990 (she had a FTM chauffeur); someone who put her money into Black neighborhoods and schools not because it would earn her “woke” points but because it was a good thing she could do. A Christian, but the kind of Christian who always hinted at deeper mystical beliefs, the kind of Christian who loved vampires enough to give us Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in the same way that we would not have Star Trek without Lucille Ball, we would not have Buffy without Dolly).
Dolly Parton receiving Kennedy Center honors in 2006. Photo Credit: Eric Draper – Public Domain
In all ways, an extraordinary human. The kind of person for whom we have words like saint. Long before her passing, you could find votive candles featuring Dolly. Queen of Hearts. Rhinestone Angel. Patron Saint of Drag Queens.
The loss to the 2SLGBTQIA+ community is especially keen because she always spoke up for us. She always modeled not merely tolerance but exuberant acceptance. Celebration. Joy.
So, how do you mourn that person? We don’t even have a word for this kind of grief. It is the loss of someone you never met but whose every word and action made it clear that she loved you. She wanted you to thrive.
Celebrity is a complicated thing in our culture. Perhaps inescapably, because we don’t really have saints anymore. We don’t have mythic heroes. Our age of wonders has passed (if anything, it’s been ground out of us). Our heroic stories are Marvel franchises, such as they are. We rally behind influencers. We develop parasocial relationships – both to our detriment and the detriment of the objects of our fixations. We blur the lines between actor and character, telling ourselves stories about how we might interact through self-insert fanfictions.
Not everyone, of course, but enough to demonstrate clearly: we don’t know how to contextualize these feelings, let alone process them.
And then there comes a loss like Dolly’s. Profound. Personal. A palpable impact upon the state of our world going forward. A light literally leaving us.
So, how do we mourn?
I think folks who are constrained by secularism or whatever Christianity has currently become will struggle more than most. I know, for myself, the feelings inspired by Dolly’s passing remind me why our forebears practiced ancestor veneration. Those hand-lettered signs, the balloons and ribbons folks quickly put up: they might not recognize them as altars and shrines, but, as Pagans, we know.
We might not have a name for it, and maybe we don’t need one, because we have a feeling. The sort of gnosis one carries in soul and in heart. We process the death of someone like Dolly by allowing ourselves to be inspired by her life. To hear her wisdom. To celebrate her art. And, most importantly, to let the life she lived inspire us in the living of our own.
To a life well-lived. We will never see another like her.
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