The Light Dolly Left Behind

By Lane Byrum
Director of Corporate Accounts & Emotional Intelligence Coach
SHIFT Company

When I learned that Dolly Parton had died, my reaction surprised me. It wasn’t simply sadness over the death of someone whose music had been around for virtually my entire life. I never met Dolly. I didn’t know her. But somehow, losing her felt personal. I’ve been trying to understand why.

I think it’s because Dolly Parton represented something I desperately want to believe about human beings: that when we’re given influence, resources, talent and opportunity, we can choose to use them for good. And Dolly chose good. Again and again and again.

She was unmistakably herself. There was certainly no attempt to blend into the wallpaper. The hair. The rhinestones. The accent. The humor. The faith. The extraordinary talent.

Dolly never seemed particularly interested in becoming whatever version of herself would make everyone else comfortable.

But here’s what I found equally remarkable: she didn’t seem terribly interested in making everyone else become more like her, either. She could hold her beliefs without weaponizing them. She could live her values without demanding that everyone around her share them. She could disagree without seemingly needing to diminish.

There is something deeply empathic about that way of moving through the world.

Perhaps that’s part of why people across political, religious, cultural and generational divides loved her. In a country where we increasingly sort one another into camps before deciding whether someone deserves our affection, Dolly somehow escaped the sorting machine.

People on the left loved Dolly. People on the right loved Dolly. People who probably couldn’t make it through Thanksgiving dinner together could apparently agree on Dolly Parton. That alone may qualify as a minor American miracle.

But I think my reaction to her death goes deeper than that. Dolly felt like a counterweight.

We live in a time when there is no shortage of evidence for selfishness, cruelty, greed and division. You don’t have to search particularly hard for it. In fact, it will happily find you, usually before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee.

And then there were people like Dolly. People who quietly reminded us that human beings are also capable of extraordinary generosity.

Her Imagination Library began in 1995, inspired in part by her father’s inability to read and write. What began as an effort to put books into the hands of children in her home county in Tennessee grew beyond anything she could have imagined.

By this summer, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library had given more than 325 million books to children around the world and was sending another 3.5 million every month.

Three hundred and twenty-five million books. Think about that for a moment. Hundreds of millions of children opening mailboxes. Hundreds of millions of bedtime stories. Hundreds of millions of moments between parents and children. Hundreds of millions of opportunities for a child to discover that reading might open a world they didn’t know existed.

That’s not celebrity philanthropy. That’s multiplication.

And that’s what finally helped me understand what I was feeling when Dolly died. It felt like one of the good lights had gone out. One of the counterweights was gone.

Except she isn’t. Because she left the counterweight here. Hundreds of millions of little pieces of it, actually.

Sitting on bookshelves. Living in children who discovered a love of reading. Living in parents who read those books beside them. Living in communities helped by her generosity. Living in people who watched what she did with her success and quietly decided they wanted to be a little more generous themselves.

That’s the kind of legacy that fascinates me. And it has caused me to ask a much more personal question.

What am I leaving behind that will continue doing good when I’m no longer here?

Not Dolly-sized. I’m not under any illusion that I’m going to distribute hundreds of millions of books. I also have neither the voice nor the rhinestones required for the other parts of her career. But scale isn’t really the point. Continuation is. I want to be one of the lights that doesn’t completely go out when I do.

I want something of the love I’ve given, the empathy I’ve practiced, the encouragement I’ve offered, the people I’ve invested in and the generosity I’ve shown to continue moving through other people after I’ve left the room.

Maybe that’s one measure of a life well lived. Not how much attention we accumulated while we were here. But how much goodness kept moving after we were gone. Dolly Parton showed us what that could look like on an extraordinary scale.

The rest of us get to decide what it looks like with the particular lives, gifts and resources we’ve been given. And maybe that’s one more gift Dolly left us. Not simply an example to admire. An example to follow.

Leadership is an inside-out journey. At SHIFT Company, we believe that when people grow, teams grow. And when teams grow, organizations thrive. That’s why we partner with organizations to develop leaders at every stage of their journey—through executive coaching, team coaching, and workshops on Empathy, Storytelling, and the Enneagram in Business.

Whether you’re investing in a single leader or transforming an entire leadership team, we’ll meet you where you are and help you take the next meaningful step. If you’d like to explore what’s possible for your leaders or organization, I’d love to start a conversation.  Please reach out to me at [email protected].