The day after Dolly passed, we went to Dollywood.
The timing was a coincidence. We had planned the trip about a month earlier. Dollywood has homeschool days after public schools go back and before the Fall Festival begins. That happened to be when we were going.
I don’t have many pictures from that day. My phone was somewhere on the side of a mountain after flying out of my back pocket on Lightning Rod. The memorial picture came from my husband’s phone.
It shows my boys standing in front of the flowers, drawings and handwritten notes people had left for Dolly.
Dolly built one of the most recognizable brands in the world. But nobody standing in front of those flowers was there because of her branding.
They were there because she had become part of their lives.
She showed up in our mailbox
For our family, Dolly showed up through the Imagination Library.
She gave us a book about safe sleep when I had a baby and needed to know how to keep him safe. She gave us a book about helping children work through big emotions. There were stories about Grandma’s garden, a llama’s adventures and all kinds of colorful worlds my boys could visit from our couch.
Then came the kindergarten book.
Those books were not advertising in our house. They were bedtime. They were questions from little boys who wanted one more page. They helped us talk about being safe, naming a feeling and imagining something beyond the room we were sitting in.
She became part of our family without ever meeting us.
She gave families places to meet
When you think of Dolly, you probably think of “I Will Always Love You.” I do too.
Her songs were already part of our family before my children were born. I sang them to my babies. My grandparents sang them to each other. My grandchildren will hear them too.
Then there is Dollywood itself.
It has rides for the aunts and uncles who cannot wait to sling you onto a roller coaster. It has shows for your Mawmaws and Pawpaws. It has animals, music and cinnamon bread to pull apart with your brothers, sisters, cousins and friends.
She built a huge family entertainment empire. More important, she built places where families could make memories together.
That is why the park felt different the day after she died. People were not only thinking about a famous person they had watched from far away. They were remembering the ways she had been present in their own homes and families.
What people carry with them
I spend a lot of time thinking about messaging. I teach it, I use it in my business and I believe clear words matter. Standing there, though, the word brand felt too small.
Being known is not the same as mattering. Clear words can help people understand what you do. They cannot replace the way people feel after you have been part of their lives.
No one wants to pass and have “Here lies the world’s greatest Realtor” on their gravestone.
We want our work to matter, but not because we were the loudest or had the best logo. We want it to matter because somebody felt safer, braver, more hopeful or less alone after knowing us.
Dolly built an enormous career. She also sent books to children she would never meet. She created jobs, protected wildlife, filled theaters and gave families reasons to spend a day together. She shared stories that moved from one generation to the next.
Most of us will never work at that scale. We still get to decide whether the work we do helps someone else live a little better.
We share what we know. We make room for color and imagination. We help people hope and dream because life is better when those things are shared.
The picture of my boys in front of those flowers is not a picture about a brand. It is a picture of what can happen when one person’s work becomes part of other people’s lives.
We live so other people can live too.
