Give ’em your smile.
The world felt a little less sparkly last week.
When the news came that Dolly Parton had passed away at 80, it seemed like the world collectively stopped for a minute. Dolly? Our Dolly?
Surely, Dolly Parton was one of those people who was just going to live forever. But on August 25, 2026, Dolly left this world, and suddenly people everywhere were mourning a woman most of us had never actually met.
And yet, somehow, it felt like we had.
I have always loved Dolly. Not just her music, although goodness knows there is a Dolly song for practically every emotional crisis a woman can have. Heartbreak? Dolly. Bad boss? Dolly. Questionable man? Dolly definitely has you covered. I loved that she was completely and unapologetically Dolly Parton.
The hair was too high. The eyelashes were too long. The rhinestones were too many. The heels were too tall. And somehow, it was all exactly right.
Dolly once joked that it cost a lot of money to look cheap, which may be one of the greatest examples of self-awareness ever uttered by a woman wearing approximately twelve pounds of sequins.
But here is what I think made Dolly so special.
She created this enormous physical character called Dolly Parton, but underneath all of the wigs and rhinestones and makeup was something incredibly real.
Joy.
Not manufactured happiness. Not celebrity charm. Not the polished kind of niceness that disappears when the cameras turn off.
Joy.
The kind that spills over onto other people. Dolly understood something I think our world desperately needs to remember: you don’t have to dim someone else’s light to make yours brighter. Think about how rare that is.
For a woman who spent more than six decades in an industry famous for competition, gossip, egos and feuds, Dolly somehow managed to become enormously successful without building her career by tearing someone else down.
She could be funny without being cruel. She could disagree without being hateful. She could laugh at herself before she ever laughed at someone else. And she could walk into a room looking like a rhinestone factory had exploded and somehow still make you feel like the interesting one.
That was Dolly.
Her reach was almost impossible to comprehend. She went from growing up poor in the mountains of Tennessee to becoming one of the most recognizable women on earth. She wrote thousands of songs, sold more than 100 million records, built Dollywood, starred in movies and gave hundreds of millions of books to children through her Imagination Library!
And when she died, the world responded.
At Buckingham Palace, the King’s Guard played 9 to 5. In New York, the Empire State Building glowed pink. London’s Piccadilly Lights honored her. Tributes came from musicians, world leaders, actors and ordinary people from countries thousands of miles away from that little Tennessee cabin where her story began. From Buckingham Palace to front porches in Tennessee. From people who knew every word to Coat of Many Colors to people who couldn’t name five Dolly songs but somehow still knew exactly who she was.
Dolly belonged to everybody.
And maybe that’s why the grief felt so strange and so personal. We weren’t only mourning a singer. We were mourning a little bit of goodness. Because Dolly seemed to possess something increasingly rare: the ability to be loved by people who didn’t necessarily agree with one another.
In a world where we are constantly encouraged to pick a side, announce our side, defend our side and possibly unfriend Aunt Linda because of her side, Dolly just kept being Dolly.
She didn’t seem terribly interested in making people angrier. She wanted to make them happier. She encouraged. She gave. She laughed. She sang. She wrote books and songs and checks. She helped children learn to read. Her Imagination Library grew from a program inspired by her father’s inability to read into an international literacy effort distributing tens of millions of books every year.
She helped families after devastating fires. She supported medical research. She quietly showed up for people. And perhaps most importantly, she never seemed to lose the girl from Tennessee underneath all that hairspray.
There is something beautiful about that.
You can become bigger without believing you are better. You can become successful without becoming hard. You can become wealthy without forgetting what it felt like to have very little. And apparently, you can wear a blonde wig tall enough to interfere with regional air traffic and still remain remarkably grounded. That’s the part I want to remember.
My favorite Dollyism has always been:
“If you see someone without a smile today, give ’em yours.”
Isn’t that just Dolly? She didn’t say, “Figure out what’s wrong with them.” She didn’t say, “Tell them how they should fix their life.” She didn’t say, “Post a vague inspirational quote on Facebook and hope they see it.”
She said: Give them yours.
Your smile. Your joy. Your kindness. Give something away. And isn’t that really what Dolly did her entire life? She took action – she had dreams. Do you?
She gave us her songs.- She gave children books. She gave communities money. She gave struggling people encouragement. She gave us laughter. She gave us permission to be a little ridiculous. And she gave us joy.
I believe joy is one of the most beautiful gifts God gives us, but I also believe He expects us to pass it around. That’s one of the reasons that I created Sursees – I wanted to help people share joy.
Scripture tells us, “A cheerful heart is good medicine.” — Proverbs 17:22
Dolly was pretty good medicine. Maybe that is why this loss feels bigger than celebrity news. Because we need people like her – people who walk into rooms and make them lighter. We need people who refuse to participate in cruelty. We need people who can disagree and still be kind, who aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves. We need people who remember where they came from and we need people who notice when someone else has lost their smile.
So perhaps the best way to honor Dolly isn’t simply to play I Will Always Love You at full volume today.
Maybe we honor her by becoming a little more like her. Encourage someone. Compliment the woman standing next to you. Call the friend you’ve been thinking about. Give something away. Buy a child a book. Forgive somebody. Laugh at yourself. Wear the ridiculous earrings. Add the extra sparkle. Find something that lights up your joy!
And when you see somebody who has temporarily misplaced their smile…
give them yours
I think that the beautiful thing about a life lived with that much joy is that the joy doesn’t leave when the person does. It gets passed along. From person to person. Smile to smile. Little kindness to little kindness. And maybe that’s our job now. Keep passing it along. We will miss you, Dolly.
Thank you for the music. Thank you for the laughter. Thank you for reminding us that you can be wildly successful and still be wildly kind. Thank you for proving that being glamorous and being good are not mutually exclusive.
And thank you for showing us that sometimes the brightest thing a person can wear isn’t a rhinestone at all.
It’s joy.
We will always love you.
