Dolly, Grief, and an Ordinary Tuesday

I finished a therapy session this past Tuesday, opened my coworker Brad's door, and was getting ready to explore our lunch options for the day when he said, "Did you hear Dolly passed?"

I know I looked confused. It took me a second to process what he had said, and then I was shocked.

I worked the rest of the day, had book club that night, and later caught up with two old friends over a late-night dinner at Waffle House because one of them was in town. Of course, Dolly was mentioned in all of those spaces throughout the rest of the evening.

I really didn't get the chance to do the deep social media doom scroll until around midnight. And like a big portion of you, I was continually amazed by what people posted about her. The stories, all the pictures, and the memories. The things she had quietly done for people. The reminders of how much good one person had put into the world.

So on Friday, when I was heading out for an hour-long bike ride, I decided I wanted to listen to a book, podcast, or something about Dolly. I landed on her book Dream More, most likely because it was a little over an hour and would work well with my bike ride.

Dream More is an expanded version of the commencement speech she gave at the University of Tennessee in May 2009. She would have been 63 at the time. The book itself came out a few years later. It is worth listening to. She explores four principles: dream more, learn more, care more, and be more. But as I listened, I found myself especially curious whenever she mentioned her own death. There were two occasions that caught my attention.

The first was this:

"I have to dream bigger: I have to work harder. And that is fine with me. I never will retire. And I hope I won't ever go to seed. As they say, I would certainly rather wear out than rust out. I hope that I drop dead right onstage one of these days, doing exactly what I want to do. It might shake up the audience a little bit, but I hope everybody knows that is exactly what I want...And when it does, just know that I went happy, because chasing my dreams is what I do love to do."

I found it interesting that she imagined herself working until the end, which she did. She didn't talk about finally reaching some point where she was finished. She wanted to continue chasing her dreams.

The second passage was about the Imagination Library:

"To date we have given away more than forty million books, and now we can visualize that number someday will be forty billion. If I am remembered one hundred years from now, I hope it will be not for looks but for books."

That one stayed with me too. It says something about what she valued and what she hoped would remain after she was gone.

She loved music, writing, and storytelling, but those things also became the vessel through which she could do so much more good in the world. If I lean into her spirituality, I think of Proverbs 11:25: “Whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.” Dolly seemed to live that. She was an allocator of resources. What came to her didn't simply stop with her. She kept moving the goodwill forward.

So, like many of you, I felt sad this week when Dolly died.

But I also think her passing gave a lot of people a reminder that it is okay to feel sorrow. It is okay to grieve. And sometimes the death of someone we didn't personally know gives us a place to process emotions that may not entirely be about that person.

Which brings me to grief.

One of my favorite descriptions of grief comes from Suleika Jaouad in her book Between Two Kingdoms. She writes:

"Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you are at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you've forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath by breath."

She gets it and if you know her journey, you understand why. There is too much to share in this blog, but go Google her name.

I have known several people who have died this year. Their deaths were unexpected in different ways. They were different ages. They had different circumstances. Each of them lived different stories. But I have found myself thinking a lot about the people left behind.

There is the immediate grief when someone dies. People call and text. Meals arrive. Flowers are sent. Stories are shared and people gather. For a little while, the world around you recognizes that something significant has happened. And then everyone else's life starts moving again. In many ways It has to.

People go back to work. Kids have practices. There are meetings to attend, vacations to take, birthdays to celebrate, and groceries to buy. The world keeps moving. But for the people closest to the loss, their world has fundamentally changed.

And I think this is one of the places where grief can become incredibly isolating. Not necessarily because people stop caring. Most of the time, I don't think that is what happens at all. It is because everyone is living on a different timeline. The people around you may remember the person who died. You are learning how to live without them. Those are two very different experiences.

Maybe one of the kindest things we can do for someone who is grieving is simply remember that. Check in after everyone else has stopped checking in. Say the person's name. Ask about them. Don't assume that bringing them up will somehow remind the person that they died. They haven't forgotten.

Consider allowing grief to exist alongside everything else. Someone can laugh and still be grieving. They can have a really good day and still be grieving. They can build a life they genuinely love and still desperately wish that one person was here to see it. Life and grief can exist in the same space.

Which brings me back to Dolly. The two passages from Dream More that caught my attention seem different at first, but I don't think they really are. One was about how she wanted to live until she died and the other was about what she hoped would remain after she did.

How do I want to live until I die? And what do I hope remains after I do?

Dolly seemed to have thought about her death without allowing death to become the focus of her life. If anything, knowing life would eventually end seemed to make her clearer about what she wanted to do with it. She wanted to keep creating, dreaming, working, and giving.

We don't get to control when death interrupts a life. The losses I have watched this year have certainly reminded me of that. Sometimes an ordinary day becomes the dividing line between everything that happened before and everything that comes after.

But being reminded that life ends can also give us another opportunity to think about what we are doing with the life we have. Not in the cliché way of needing to seize every day or make every moment meaningful. That sounds exhausting and most of life doesn't work that way.

Most of life is pretty ordinary. It is lunch with a coworker, a good bike ride, and a monthly book club. Or a late-night Waffle House dinner with old friends. A conversation you didn't know would matter. Checking in on someone months after everyone else has gone back to their lives.

Maybe the ordinary is where most of our life actually happens.

References:
Jaouad, S. (2021). Between two kingdoms: A memoir of a life interrupted. Random House.
Parton, D. (2012). Dream more: Celebrate the dreamer in you. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Kindle edition.

About the Author
Sarah Currie, Ph.D., LCMHC, is a counselor, writer, and speaker exploring the questions that shape how we live, connect, and grow.