What Dolly Parton taught us about how to give

Dolly Parton proved that helping others is not only easy to do, but can be a lot of fun. | Katherine Bomboy/NBC Dolly Parton was on her way to the studio to polish off “ Blue Smoke ” when the SUV she was riding in collided with a sedan in a Nashville intersection in 2013.

At the hospital, she struck an unlikely friendship with her physician, Naji Abumrad, who, like Parton, was raised in a misty mountain village, hers in East Tennessee and his in Lebanon.

“It’s just like how you meet people in your life.

You just click, you just feel like you know them,” Parton once told his son, Jad Abumrad, a public radio host who interviewed Parton for a nine-part series on her life.

“There are just some things that, you know, you just can’t explain it.

You just be it, you just live it, you just know it, and you just feel it.” The whole world, it seems, felt it — that inexplicably swift, sweet connection — with Dolly Parton herself, a light-filled, lifelong philanthropist in the truest, most etymological sense of the word: a lover of humankind.

Some seven years after their friendship began, Abumrad told Parton that his fellow researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were looking into a possible vaccine for Covid-19, which had just begun to rage across the country.

Without missing a beat, Parton wrote a check for $1 million, an early contribution toward what would eventually become the Moderna vaccine against Covid-19.

Her donation “made the research towards the vaccine go 10 times faster than it would be without it,” Abumrad later told the Washington Post , calling his friend “the kindest and most philanthropic human being” he’d ever known.

Parton, who died at the age of 80 yesterday, was raised with her 11 siblings amid poverty in the Smoky Mountains of Eastern Tennessee.

She often credited her upbringing as a muse for both her music and her generosity.

Just as integral to her persona as her kitschy high-femme glamour, her poofy hair and rhinestones, was Parton’s capacity for helping others.

With an infectious sense of joy and optimism, she proved that helping others is not only easy to do, but can be a lot of fun.

Parton’s most famous foray into philanthropy by far was her Imagination Library, which she founded in 1995 in honor of her father, who never learned to read or write.