When Caring for Others Costs Us Ourselves: What Dolly Parton’s Story Can Teach Us About Caregiving
Sep 4, 2026
Dolly Parton gave the world so much through her music, joy, generosity, humor, and enormous heart. She spent her life lifting others, and before her passing, she also spoke openly about a role millions of people understand deeply: caring for someone you love. While reflecting on the long illness of her husband, Carl, Dolly shared that she had stopped taking care of herself during that season and let things go that she knew needed her attention. We cannot draw conclusions about the cause of Dolly’s cancer, but her words reveal an important truth about caregiver burnout: when you are focused on caring for someone you love, it can become incredibly easy to disappear from your own life.
Caregiving Was Never Meant to Be Done Alone
Caregivers postpone their own appointments, ignore exhaustion, put their needs last, and tell themselves they will take care of themselves later. Nurses and other healthcare professionals may experience this from both sides, spending their working hours caring for patients and then going home to care for aging parents, spouses, children, or other loved ones. Burnout is often treated as an individual problem that caregivers should somehow solve by taking better care of themselves, but after more than 25 years in end-of-life care and caring for more than 1,000 people at the end of life, Doulagivers Institute founder Suzanne B. O’Brien RN has seen a much bigger problem. This is not an individual failure. It is a community failure. Caregiving was never meant to rest on the shoulders of one exhausted person, which is why learning how to care for the caregiver is just as important as learning how to care for the person who is ill.
We Have Lost Much of the Knowledge Around End of Life
For generations, families, friends, neighbors, and communities knew how to surround one another through aging, serious illness, dying, grief, and loss. Today, families are often expected to navigate increasingly complex care with very little preparation, while nurses work within healthcare systems that may leave little time for the deeply human care that drew many of them to the profession in the first place. At the same time, most of us receive very little education about what actually happens at the end of life until we are suddenly facing it. End-of-life education can change that. Understanding what to expect, how to provide comfort, how to talk about wishes, and how to support a family can replace some of the fear surrounding death with knowledge and confidence. For healthcare professionals experiencing burnout, learning about the end-of-life doula model of care can also offer an opportunity to reconnect with the human side of caregiving and remember why they felt called to this work.
The Great Return: Remembering How to Care for One Another
At Doulagivers Institute, we believe it is time for what Suzanne calls The Great Return, a return to communities that know how to care for their own. Our work is built around the SET framework: Sacred Remembering, Education, and Training.
S: Sacred Remembering
Remembering that aging, caregiving, dying, and grief are not medical failures. They are sacred human experiences. Caring for one another is one of the most meaningful things we will ever do.
E: Education
Education gives families practical knowledge before a crisis occurs, through resources such as our free Level 1 Family Caregiver and End-of-Life Doula Training, caregiver resources, and Life Café.
T: Training
Training brings this knowledge even deeper into communities by preparing people, including nurses and other healthcare professionals, through professional End-of-Life Doula Certification to support individuals and families with skill, confidence, and compassion.
Learning About Death Can Teach Us How to Live
Every one of us will eventually be touched by aging, caregiving, death, and grief, yet we do not have to wait for a crisis to begin learning about them. Dolly’s experience reminds us that even the strongest and most capable people can lose themselves while caring for someone they love. The answer cannot simply be asking caregivers to do more; we need better education, stronger support systems, and communities that understand how to show up for one another.
Learning about end of life is not simply learning about death. It can help us become better caregivers, better nurses, better family members, and more present human beings. It can help us become less afraid of what is ahead and more intentional about the life we are living now.
Community taking care of community. This is how we change the world.
Additional Resources:
The GOOD DEATH Seminar Series: Register here
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