Suzanne Harrington: Goodbye Dolly — we will always love you 

Dolly wrote 3,000 songs in her lifetime, including 25 number-one hits. Picture: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

Nooooo! Not Dolly! Does the Grim Reaper have dyslexia? He took the wrong prominent 80-year-old American whose first name starts with D.  

Dolly, we adored you. Old, young, gay, straight, black, white, religious, secular, and across the entire political spectrum, you shone your light equally - and we all bathed in it. We unequivocally, universally loved you. Even those of us who had never listened to a country and western song in our lives adored you. You were bigger than music, bigger than showbiz, bigger even than your own fabulous wigs.

It's weird to write about you in the past tense. You have always been a timeless presence, an American fixture. You dissolved all the categories and boundaries and identities, which we like to affix to people: a feminist icon devoted to your beloved Carl, a white woman from the Deep South who supported Black Lives Matter, a Christian advocate of equal marriage and trans rights: "I try to love everybody."

And how we loved you back. 

Your magic transcended musical genres, as you stood in front of us, a self-created goddess of glorious kitsch. Hair, teeth, bosoms, rhinestones, humour, empathy. Humane, hilarious. Brains and talent to burn. That honeyed Tennessee drawl. Your literal rags-to-riches origin story, long mythologised, but never forgotten.

Dolly Parton on the stage at Live at the Marquee Cork in 2014. Picture: Miki Barlok

Even though you died richer than your illiterate sharecropper dad could have ever imagined, not for you was the insane hoarding of wealth, the pulling up of the ladder. You were by choice not a billionaire, because you realised that true wealth comes from sharing it. Books to children, not just locally but globally via the Imagination Library. Funding health care, medical research, disaster relief, community development, scholarships and education. You were a true humanitarian who - officially at least - didn't "do politics".

If that makes you sound like Lisa Simpson in spangles, you were far more fun than that. Only you could have created the fever dream that is Dollywood, high on many bucket lists, including my own. Or played a rhinestone-encrusted saxophone at Glastonbury to accompany a song you'd written specially for the festival, titled Mud.

You were, first and foremost, raw, unfiltered talent. Writing Jolene and I Will Always Love You back-to-back in 1972. 3,000 songs, almost 50 studio albums, 25 number ones, 11 Grammys - you took the formerly looked-down-upon genre of country music and made it fabulous with your voice and face and talent and ability to make people laugh and cry and sing along. You made self-deprecation an art form: "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap."

In terms of how much love and connection you generated, losing you is like losing a Dalai Lama or a David Attenborough. In the hours after your nephew announced how you were no longer on earth, we reacted uncharacteristically. We united in love. From Oprah, Elton, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift to a string of American presidents (including the current one, famous for dissing the freshly dead), people lined up to laud you, to thank you, to mourn you. Even an atheist could imagine you in heaven - wings, wigs, and a sparkly guitar. 

Goodbye Dolly - we will always love you.