Bye Dolly

This article is going to be a different one, more personal and less technical. I won’t be discussing much about tech or news on Beaver, you’ll need to wait a bit for that. I decided to write this article to reflect on the passing of Dolly Parton, one of my favorite artists and one of the people whose words have quietly accompanied me through some of the most important parts of my life.

I’m not very good at putting feelings into words. That’s probably why I’ve been staring at this page for longer than I’d like to admit, trying to figure out how to write about someone I’ve never met, but who somehow felt part of my family and probably yours too.

Dolly’s music has been with me through countless long coding sessions. There is something strangely comforting about having her voice in the background while you’re staring at a screen at two in the morning, trying to figure out why something you’ve been working on for hours isn’t working. Her songs became part of those moments for me. They made the long hours feel a little less lonely. But it wasn’t only the music.

What always struck me about Dolly was her wisdom. She had this remarkable ability to say something simple and make it stay with you. Her words about life, work, kindness, ambition, failure, and getting back up again always seemed to carry more weight than they had any right to. There was never a sense that she had forgotten where she came from. If anything, her success seemed to make her more determined to use it to help other people.

And that has always inspired me. Dolly Parton’s story is, in many ways, a story about ambition. She came from incredibly humble beginnings and dreamed far beyond what anyone around her might have expected. She didn’t apologize for wanting more from life. She worked for it. She took risks, failed, learned, kept going, and eventually built something enormous, not just a career, but a legacy.

That is something I find myself thinking about a lot. It is easy to look at someone like Dolly after decades of success and see the finished picture. The awards, the songs, the movies, the businesses, the philanthropy, the millions of people whose lives she touched. But underneath all of that was a person who simply had a dream and decided to take it seriously.

For someone like me, who spends a lot of time building things and dreaming about what I might be able to accomplish, that matters. Dolly reminded me that ambition isn’t something to be embarrassed about. That wanting to build something meaningful isn’t selfish. That you can be incredibly successful without becoming cynical, and that you don’t have to lose your kindness on the way there.

In a way, that’s part of why I started Beaver Notes in the first place. I wanted to build something of my own, something I could be proud of, and something that might be useful to other people. It started as a small project, but like many things I’ve worked on, I wanted to see how far I could take it. Dolly’s story was always a reminder to me that it was okay to dream bigger.

Even the name of my homelab is Dolly. It’s a small thing, and probably something most people would never notice, but it has always been my own little way of keeping that inspiration around me. Every time I work on it, I’m reminded of the person whose voice accompanied so many of those long nights and whose story made me want to keep building, keep learning, and keep dreaming a little bigger.

I think that’s why her passing hurts more than I expected it to. She wasn’t someone I knew personally. I never got to shake her hand, have a conversation with her, or tell her how much her work meant to me. But artists have a strange way of becoming part of our lives anyway. Their voices become attached to memories, the Christmases, the time staring at a screen or the ceiling, the happy and sad times. Their stories become things we return to when we need encouragement. Their words become little pieces of advice we carry around without even realizing it.

Dolly’s voice will still be there the next time I sit down for another impossibly long coding session. I’ll still hear those songs, and I’ll still think about the person behind them, the woman who dreamed big, worked relentlessly, stayed kind, and somehow managed to make ambition look joyful.

I don’t think I have the words to properly say goodbye. So maybe I’ll just say thank you. Thank you for the music. Thank you for the stories. Thank you for the wisdom. Thank you for showing people like me that it is okay to dream bigger than the circumstances you started with.

And thank you for reminding me that success is not only about how far you go, but about what you do with the distance you’ve traveled.

Rest well, Dolly, you deserve it.

I’ll keep listening, dreaming, and loving. Just like you did for us all.