I was on my way to get the oil changed in my car, sitting in line at the Jiffy Lube, when I heard Dolly died. It was a Tuesday, and I was wearing my nice clothes because it was my second day at a new office job. Safely in park, I checked my phone, and that's when I saw.

Surprisingly, the news didn't come from any of the places you would expect. I follow a dozen different country music fan accounts on Instagram and I have several cowboys and cowgirls on speed-dial, but I actually saw it first on Discord. This had to have been only a few minutes after the news broke, because no tribute posts were up yet on the socials. Just a quick "Dolly Parton died" in a group chat. No offbeat jokes made about it in typical Discord fashion, just those words and a flurry of salute and tear reacts.

Of course I didn't believe it, even though my stomach did an adrenaline-fueled kickflip upon reading the words. All surprising things you see on the internet are probably fake, and if you don't believe that, Abraham Lincoln's got a bridge he'd like to sell you. I waited until it was on Wikipedia to accept the reality, and by that point, I had taken twenty minutes to process and was sitting in the Jiffy Lube lobby, hoping the mechanic would fix my car fast so I could get to work on time.

I didn't cry that day, but I know people who did. Half of Tennessee shut down.

They renamed an airport after her. They designated not one, but two days in her honor that month. They blasted fireworks and lit the Nashville skyline pink at 9:25 PM. I didn't know a pink butterfly was her symbol until recently, but social media filled up with a flutter of them in the first 24 hours. For anyone else, it would have been excessive and performative, acts of one-upmanship by different governments and corporations jumping on a terrible trend. But Dolly was Tennessee, in a very real way. She was love and empathy and faith the way it should be. There wasn't a single person in America who hadn't been touched by her honesty at some point, and that included me.

I didn't cry that day, but I cried two months later, listening to all those famous people tell their Dolly stories on live TV. It wasn't just country music, it wasn't just the South--everyone was there to honor her life, and so was I.

That was last night. Today I'm walking in the park after work and there's a butterfly on the trellis by the swings, and I think I'll never be able to look at one the same way again.