In the end, Dolly Parton did what she’d always done: she turned even death into a love song for her people. While the public will remember the towering hits and glittering wigs, her family will stand in a small, guarded room and hear “If We Never Meet Again” — the same hymn that once rose over her father’s coffin. For them, it won’t be a performance. It will be a promise.

That choice fits the life she lived. Dolly climbed from a two-room cabin with no electricity to the world’s biggest stages, then spent decades giving away her success — books for children, scholarships for students, shelter for wildfire victims, funding for hospitals and vaccines. She sang about faith and hope, then quietly bankrolled them in real life. As that hymn plays, it will echo everything she believed: that love outlives us, and that goodbyes are only temporary.