On Tuesday, August 25, 2026, Dolly Parton’s death was announced by her nephew, Bryan Seaver. “Dolly opened doors for generations of singers, songwriters, musicians, and dreamers from every walk of life and across every continent. By her example, we believed that anything was possible,” he said in a video released on her social media.

Dolly Parton (1946–2026) rose to fame in America in the 1970s and remained in the limelight well into the 2000s, making her a relatively unfamiliar name among people born from 2000 onward. This is the generation otherwise known as Gen Z. For many people in this age group, the announcement of her death, and the reaction of the older generation who grew up listening to her, forced them to become curious about her. Several subsequently expressed disbelief that they did not know about her until now, and disappointment that such a level of craft, creativity and personality seemed rare among musicians today.

Dolly Parton was whimsical in her singing, speaking and writing. Even in the video she released in May 2026 to speak about her illness, she still had jokes to tell.

“But, you know, I’ve told you before that I’ve always had problems with my kidney stones. Lord, they did more stones out of me a year than the rock quarry in Rockwood, Tennessee,” she laughed.

Many people noted how unusual it was for someone to be that witty while announcing that she was ill and would need to take some time away from her art. As though responding to this, she added, “Anyway, I know I’m being silly, but I’m just trying to keep everything light and airy. They say that a happy heart is like good medicine.”

The same post-death endearment was felt when David Lynch (1946–2025) passed away in 2025. Lynch was an eccentric filmmaker and artist, popular for his surrealist style of expression. He was successful at making arthouse movies appealing to a mainstream audience. Like Parton, his interviews swarmed the internet after his death, and art and film enthusiasts who had not encountered him before were introduced not only to his work but to his mind.

Artists rarely stay in the mainstream public eye throughout their careers. They consistently occupy the stage in the first few years of their breakout before giving way to other artists to have their run. Today, the first few years of an artist taking centre stage is sometimes referred to as a “generational run.” After this, their core audience moves with them to more curated spaces and continues to engage with their work until newsworthy events such as a wedding or death bring them back into the general public consciousness.

This is why, although Dolly Parton had people who continued to listen to her music and David Lynch had movie lovers who watched and studied his filmmaking style over the years, new audiences were not necessarily introduced to them until their deaths. Quoting a video of Parton performing “Two Doors Down,” one X user wrote: “y’all really finna make me do a deep dive on her music. Like I didn’t realise she was such a good singer?”

Death is one of the things that forces introspection on those who are alive. It is also quite the fate of many artists to have their art widely appreciated only after they are gone. Sometimes immediately after their death, sometimes years later. One such instance is Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died at 27 and whose art became increasingly famous and commercially valuable after his death.

For Parton and Lynch, unlike Basquiat, there were many interviews through which people could understand who they were—their quirks, the way they thought about their art and their lives, and all the other things that made them interesting as individuals and artists. For the Gen Z audience that only discovered them after their deaths, these interviews became a way of getting to know them. And it is through these interviews that one begins to question the quality of one’s own life and the choices one is making.

Although they were invariably working, these two artists seemed to have enjoyed dedicating their lives to their art careers. There was a sense that the work was not simply something they did in order to eventually arrive at a shiny life; the work itself was part of the life they wanted to live.

This seems increasingly different from the capitalist and hustle-until-retirement culture being sold to young people today, including those pursuing careers in the arts. We are encouraged to work, accumulate, build and postpone living until some undefined future when we will finally have enough time, money or freedom to invest in our talent and enjoy the lives we have spent so much time preparing for.

But what if the life is already happening while we are making the thing?

Perhaps this is part of what makes the lives of artists like Parton and Lynch so compelling in retrospect. They did not simply become famous. They became themselves. They spent decades making things, developing their craft, cultivating their eccentricities and allowing their work to become inseparable from the lives they lived.

There were other conversations around Dolly Parton after her death, including discussions about the unconventional marriage she shared with her late husband, Carl Dean, and her staying without a biological child until she passed away. Granted, she had health issues that made it difficult for her to have biological children, and there were other options she could have explored. Yet, perhaps, she had come to understand something that many people only realise late in life, the same thing that became apparent in the conversations around David Lynch’s life and death.

An X user, AmeriKraut, put it this way: “not a single person has wondered whether dolly’s life had any meaning because she didn’t have any kids. It’s almost like your legacy is about what YOU do with your time here; not how many people you can make.”

This is not to speak against reproduction, as every one of us is a product of it. But perhaps the more urgent question about our existence should be what we make of the deposits in us.

What do we do with the things that have been placed inside us? What do we make with our curiosity, our imagination, our abilities, our humour, our ideas and our capacity to create?

And perhaps, in the end, this is what it means to live: to take whatever has been deposited in us and give others something to dream from.

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