Dolly Parton Couldn’t Rely on Her Husband When She Was Sick: ‘He Doesn’t Handle It Well’
In the 1980s, Dolly Parton went through a difficult period, and she admitted her husband didn’t know how to handle it. After turmoil in her personal and professional life, in addition to health problems, Parton said she was left feeling very alone. She shared why her husband didn’t know how to help her.
Dolly Parton said her husband didn’t know how to react when she was sick
In the early 1980s, Parton began dealing with health problems. At the same time, her very close personal and professional relationship with her band leader, Gregg Perry, ended. She also dealt with some resentment from family members. All of this left her feeling destitute. Her husband, Carl Dean, wasn’t sure how to help her.
“Carl, as always, was loyal to me, but he is not strong when it comes to my having problems,” she wrote in her book Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “He would cheerfully cut his own arm off with a dull knife if he thought it would benefit me. But when I am ill or distressed in other ways, he doesn’t handle it well.”
Parton also said she couldn’t bring herself to talk about her emotional struggles with Dean. She felt that she was already a burden because she was physically sick.
“He knew I was physically sick, and that was enough of a burden on him without knowing the rest of my despair,” she wrote. “For that reason, although I needed his love and support greatly, I didn’t feel I could lay all of my problems at his feet. This was something I was going to have to survive (if indeed I was to survive) by myself.”
Parton said this period of her life lasted roughly 18 months.
She said this left her feeling alone
Parton’s decision to keep some of her problems from Dean left her feeling deeply alone. She even felt that God had abandoned her.
“I had always heard the voice of God guiding me along my way through life,” she wrote. “Now pain and anguish ripped at my heart, fear and doubt clouded my mind. I could not hear him. I wondered if even he had forsaken me.”
Parton said she eventually came out of her dark period by reading the Bible in its entirety.
Dolly Parton cared a great deal for her husband
Parton’s husband never stepped out in public, leading many people to wonder about their relationship. She said it worked well for them.
“He loves me good, and my career bein’ separate from my marriage is perfectly natural for us,” she told Alanna Nash in the book Dolly: The Biography. “We like it that way. It’s too right and too natural and too comfortable and too secure for it to ever be anything else.”
She liked that he stayed away from her work.
“He’s just the most precious thing in the world,” she said. “He’s the only thing that remains untarnished in this business.”
The pair were married for nearly 60 years.
