I want to be sad. I almost need to be. In sadness there is catharsis. We cry and we weep and we mourn and we find our way through.

I need to wallow in my grief for a while. A great light has gone from this world to the next and I need to sit in the dark for a bit and wait for the dawn.

She’s gone. After 80 years on this Earth a beacon of light and hope and happiness and more, she’s shining in a different place now.

And it’s time to mourn her. But Dolly won’t let me. What do you do, after all, when the darkness is no match for the light … her light?

In the days since her death on Tuesday, Dolly has been everywhere. You can’t escape her indomitable spirit. Somewhere right now there’s a clip of Dolly charming Johnny Carson or singing a “Everyday People” with Kermit the Frog. Somewhere someone’s listening to “9 to 5” unable to keep a toe from taping. There’s a clip of Dolly harmonizing with her Goddaughter Miley, still singing like a Wrecking Ball after 70 years in the business. And there she is younger, with Emmylou and Linda singing old time harmonies that will touch your heart even if your grass was never blue.

And someone’s watching her perform with her family, her mom and dad and some combination of her 11 brothers and sisters, proud to be sharing the family’s effortless harmonies with the world.

Dolly Parton’s spirit was effervescent. It was indominable. It was a wonder of the world.

Somehow she was the smartest, the most talented, the funniest, the most charming, the prettiest and the shrewdest person in almost every room she ever walked in to.

Do you know how amazing it is that she came from where she came from – we’re legally obligated at this point to say “dirt poor” – and make it to where she made it?

The truth is that dirt poor does her a disservice. Two parents, 12 children on a sharecropper’s income in the Smoky Mountains in the 1940s and 1950s? For many of us, the level of poverty in which Dolly Parton entered the world is simply unfathomable. More unfathomable, I suppose to the heights of wealth and power to which she reached.

Dolly’s rags to riches story is improbable but not impossible. Others have made similar climbs – very rarely but they have. But who else other than Dolly made that climbed and then reached back to lift so many others up?

If you’re a Tennessean – heck if you’re a citizen of the world – I don’t have to tell you about her works. Millions of books to kids in honor of her Daddy, the smartest man she knew who was ashamed of his inability to read or write. She supported scholarship and medicine – raising money for hospitals and science and research. When her mountains burned or when they flooded, she was there with millions of her own dollars to help her people.

Her theme park offers her people fair wages and opportunities other businesses can only dream of. A part time job at Dollywood comes with he opportunity for a full-time education and more.

But – and this is where Dolly stands above so many others- everyone was her people.

Dolly touched so many lives but simply acknowledging that they are important. They are scene and they are loved.

People who have had to fight for the place in society and those feeling left out on the margins had a champion in Dolly Parton who never made a show of her support. It always came naturally, straightforward without any thought or hesitancy.

Yes, she said, these people are my family too and I will love and support them and stand with them and for them. Dolly stopped short of saying “and you should, too.” But it was always implied.

And so, we’ve lost one of the true shining lights of the world.

Except we haven’t and that’s why I’m having trouble finding a path to mourning.

Every time I try to wallow in the darkness of her death, I find Dolly’s light instead, shining away the blues. Even the sad songs lift my spirit somehow.

I’m grateful for it but I still find it perplexing.

How do you mourn the passing of someone’s whose life, whose light and whose impact on the world was bigger than death itself.

Dolly is gone. But somehow she’ll always be here.

The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.