Stella Mae Parton said her older sister Dolly Rebecca Parton told her near the end that if doctors ran out of options, they could still try experimental drugs on her in case the work helped someone else later.
The country singer, 77, posted the account Thursday on Facebook, two days after Dolly Parton died at 80. Representatives said Parton died Tuesday, Aug. 25, at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville after what they called a brief battle with cancer. They have not named the type.
“What the world saw is exactly who she was, so much so, she told me recently that if there was no hope for her, she would still allow her medical team to try experimental drugs in the hope of helping others in the future,” Stella wrote. She called her sister one of the most generous people she had known and asked fans who wanted to honor that life to show more kindness and give more of their time.
Parton was admitted Friday, Aug. 21. Family members said she was surrounded by loved ones when she died. Her nephew Bryan Seaver, son of sister Cassie Parton and her head of security for more than 20 years, announced the death in a video she had asked him years earlier to record when the time came.
“Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly,” Seaver said, speaking for the Parton and Owens families. He said she wanted to rest in a bed of plush cotton after a lifetime in heavy rhinestones.
Stella’s post opened on the Tuesday ritual the sisters kept for years. Before sunrise they drank coffee on the phone, traded gossip, and made plans. Dolly used to tell her, “Shoot Tedda, we get more work done before the sun comes up than most folks do all day long.” Stella said that hour will never be the same.
“My big sister Dolly got her wings this past Tuesday,” she wrote. “If anyone gets to heaven I’m sure she made it right on time. I know she’s showing out big time, in all her sparkles and shine. That was my sister’s way.”
The offer Stella described fits a public record of gifts that already reached medicine. In 2020 Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for COVID-19 research that fed work on the Moderna vaccine. Her Imagination Library has sent hundreds of millions of books to children.
Health trouble had already pulled her off the road. She postponed, then canceled, a Las Vegas residency after kidney stones and what she described as immune and digestive systems that “got all out of whack.” In a statement days before she died, she said she had neglected her own care while watching over her husband, Carl Thomas Dean, who died March 3, 2025, at 82 after 58 years of marriage.
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, in Sevierville, Tennessee, the sixth of 12 children of Robert Lee Parton Sr. and Avie Lee Owens Parton. Dolly, born Jan. 19, 1946, in Pittman Center, was three years older. Stella charted on her own in the 1970s, most visibly with “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” and later wrote the memoir “Tell It Sister, Tell It.”
Six of the 12 siblings are now gone. Surviving brothers and sisters include Willadeene, Robert Lee Jr., Stella, Cassie, Freida, and Rachel Ann Parton George. Reports say Parton will be buried privately at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville, in a mausoleum next to Dean.
The Hollywood Reporter published Stella’s full tribute and said it had reached the Dolly Parton estate for comment. Nothing in the public record confirms that experimental drugs were actually given. Stella described a conversation and a willingness, not a completed trial.
She closed by thanking strangers for the love reaching the people who loved Dolly first. “She left the world a better place by being in it so let’s follow her example.”
