Dolly Parton Helped Her ‘Invalid’ Grandmother When None of the Other Grandkids Would—She’d Also Prank Her
Dolly Parton has believed in helping people for as long as she can remember. Before she helped to fund the Moderna vaccine or helped millions of children learn to read thanks to the Imagination Library, she helped her grandmother keep her dignity by brushing her hair and cleaning her nails.
Dolly Parton was the only grandkid able to spend extended time with Grandma Bessie
Parton’s grandmother on her father’s side, Bessie, experienced debilitating health issues following the birth of her last child.
“[She] had some kind of inner equilibrium problem that caused even the simplest motions to make her sick,” Parton wrote in her first memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “She had somehow acquired this condition during her last childbirth. She always lay in bed and couldn’t stand for people to even get near her because even their movement would make her queasy.”
Bessie and Poppy (what the Partons called their grandfather) lived up in the holler with their son Leonard (Parton’s uncle). The “Coat of Many Colors” singer always admired her uncle for letting her grandparents live with him.
“I loved my grandparents, and they loved me,” she wrote. “I was the only one of the kids that would spend much time up there. Most of them thought Grandma was just a griping old lady.”
Additionally, Parton was the only child who wouldn’t make her grandmother sick.
“I was the only one that could sit on her bed without it bothering her,” wrote Parton. “I guess I just knew how to do it.”
How Dolly took care of Grandma Bessie
“There were a lot of unpleasant things that Grandma had to have done for her,” wrote Parton. “I guess that’s another reason the other kids stayed shy of her. I probably would have too except for that curiosity and my inability to let sleeping grandmas lie. I just couldn’t stand to see her just lying there. It seemed like somebody just had to mess with her to remind her she was alive.”
Parton’s “Grandma Chores” included cleaning out her bedpan and washing her denchers. But to keep things interesting, Parton would sometimes prank her Grandma Bessie with an ice cold bedpan or by putting her grandmother’s denchers in her own mouth.
“She had to use a bedpan, and she would sometimes ask me to empty it,” wrote Parton. “I would take it to the creek and clean it all out like a dutiful grandchild. But then I would hang around the creek and play with it like a white porcelain boat. I would lose myself in this play, and usually, by the time I got back, Grandma Bessie was in a hurry to have her bedpan back. Well, that creek, being a mountain stream, was cold as ice, and I would hand Grandma the bedpan literally frosted over. She would slide it under her and then take in a gasp that you would swear would suck the bedroom curtains in with it.”
Dolly helped her Grandma Bessie feel a little bit like herself again
When young Parton wasn’t pranking her grandmother, she’d try to make her feel just a little bit better.
“I would clean out from under her fingernails and toenails and brush her hair, because I knew she had a lot of pride,” she wrote. “She loved for me to do that. I’d massage her feet and do whatever I could to make her feel better.”
Caring for the “Jolene” singer’s grandmother wasn’t exactly a thankless job. Sometimes, Grandma Bessie would buy her granddaughter items from the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
“I loved it when she’d send away for something for me, and I’d spend every day waiting by the mailbox until it came,” wrote Parton.
As an adult, Parton loved buying things out of catalogs, something she inherited from her Grandma Bessie.
