Stella did not hesitate when writing the tribute to her sister.
The 77-year-old singer-songwriter said that Dolly Parton, shortly before dying on Tuesday at the age of 80 at Nashville’s Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, confessed something to her that summed up who she had been her entire life: if there was no hope left for her, she still wanted her medical team to test experimental drugs, hoping that doing so would help other patients in the future. Not even at the end did she stop thinking about others.
Stella also remembered something much smaller and much more tender: every Tuesday, before sunrise, the two sisters would have coffee over the phone and share gossip, as they had done since childhood in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. “We have more important things to do than worry about idiots”, Dolly would often tell her with a laugh. Stella asked her fans to honor her memory with more kindness, just as she practiced it until the last day. 🕊️💛