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Saturday, September 5, 2026

A Sense of Doubt blog post #4219 - Dolly, Tim, Hayden, and Gloria - All great losses


A Sense of Doubt blog post #4219 - Dolly, Tim, Hayden, and Gloria - All great losses

This post is a round up of links mostly with some content.

I never posted on Hayden Panettiere's death, even though the first ever post on this blog was a critique of Heroes, primarily how her character was portrayed.

So here's a tribute.

https://ew.com/heroes-cast-reunion-hayden-panettiere-death-12068295



Mostly, this post is about the deaths and legacies of three amazing people (as amazing as Hayden though maybe more as they lived longer):

Dolly Parton

Tim Curry

Gloria Steinem

The world is poorer for their losses.

Donald Trump, the odious current president of the country, gushed about the loss of Dolly Parton while remaining SILENT about the death of Gloria Steinem.

No surprise.

Thanks for tuning in.



https://medium.com/blog/loss-grief-dolly-and-tim-e2c58866f083

Loss, grief, Dolly, and Tim

How we grieve public figures and survive our personal losses. (Issue #444)

When writer Joe Guay - Dispatches From the Guay Life! was recently watching The Sound of Music, he turned to his partner and said, “You know, the day Julie Andrews or Dolly Parton leave this earth, there is going to be a collective sob. People won’t be prepared for the feeling or the emotion. Their uniqueness has made them reach across all spectrums of humanity. It’s going to be ugly and very sad.”

When Parton died on August 25, 2026, that collective sob came.

In this issue, we’re taking a look at grief — both the worldwide outpouring of love when a public figure dies, and the quiet ways we can support those coping with recent loss.

She made us like who we are as Americans, when times have been so dark.

— Debra Groves Harman in Culture Club, Dolly Parton was The Best of Us

Remembering the public and the private

Something interesting happens when beloved figures like Parton, or actor Tim Curry, or other public figures pass away. In life, they take on a larger-than-life scope; they become symbols than people. And in death, people mourn those symbols. Dolly Parton, for Guay, was “held up as the epitome of genuineness.” It was less about Parton’s talent than her immense goodness — summed up with the mantra “What Would Dolly Do?” For Syl Lockhart, Tim Curry’s performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the first key to unlock burgeoning queerness.

But it’s important to remember that these public figures were people all the same. Loren Kantor spent a summer working on Dolly Parton’s 1980s variety show, and his interactions with the country legends were much more down to Earth — long workdays, workplace drama, and fights with management. Rand Bishop met Tim Curry during the Los Angeles run of The Rocky Horror Show (the musical the famous movie was based on) when he and friends were invited over for dinner, where Curry “went out of his way to make it quite clear that, in spite of what Rocky Horror fans might assume, he was not gay.”

For those on the inside, the gap between the symbol and the person can be confusing. Kantor’s coworker on Dolly, Tom was a bonafide Dolly fanboy — when they first met, “Tom fell to the floor and rocked back and forth in a fetal position,” Kantor writes — but it took a moment alone with Dolly (and a moment of bodily function) for him to realize that his idol was “just a regular old person like you and me.”

And despite Curry’s insistence on keeping his private life separate from his public persona, Bishop finds that insistence beside the point:

Tim Curry’s gloriously camp, defiant androgyny in The Rocky Horror Picture Show has given countless individuals permission to liberate themselves from normative constrictions and expectations and be who they are.

Of course, life continues, and people move on. Most conversations still hold safely to planning and doing, and I’ve long since learned the world won’t stop for grief. But the cost of that silence is more than I could write. Perhaps that’s just the cost of being too busy to notice.

— Thomas Allan in The Memoirist, I’ve Long Since Learned the World Won’t Stop for Grief

The ocean of grief

“It has been nine months now, and I am tired of constantly feeling this way,” writes Apeksha Apte in Pen with Paper. “I know I will grieve my father till my last breath, but I do not want every sadness or melancholy to lead me back to him.”

When we miss someone, that grief is all encompassing. Apte still feels her father’s absence in her everyday sadnesses — watching a sad movie, walking home alone. “A part of me is terrified that if I stop thinking about him, even for a few minutes, I will begin to forget him,” she writes.

This fog of remembrance is well documented, as Sadhvi Pharasi writes. Joan Didion documented it in The Year of Magical Thinking. C.S. Lewis found himself hating making the slightest effort at anything after the death of his wife. “Denise Riley, writing after her son died, described the sensation of living outside of time altogether, in a stopped present with no forward motion,” Phavarsi writes, “and she noted how quickly other people want you back inside the calendar with them.”

Trained mediator Malynnda Stewart, PhD, BCPA thinks of grief as an ocean that comes in waves — “we get knocked down, come up for air, find our footing, and look for shore.” Well-meaning people are often pointing grieving people to the shoreline, Stewart writes, when really what they need is something to help them out in the water:

Sometimes that looks like floaties, the small, immediate things that keep someone from going under today. A phone call on the anniversary nobody else remembers. Saying the name of the person who died instead of tiptoeing around it. Showing up without waiting to be asked, because asking takes energy that’s already gone.

And sometimes it’s bigger than that. Sometimes it’s boat-building, the slower, more collaborative work of helping someone construct a way to live in the water long term, not just survive the next wave.

So, as you help those around you swimming in that ocean of grief, where even a small moment can remind one of loss, help them build the boat and live with their loss.

She died. Our world fractured. It wasn’t so much that we became suddenly, brutally, a family of three. It was more like we unbecame a family of four.

Jacqueline Dooley in Grief Book Club, We Had to Relearn How to Be a Family After My Daughter Died

A final thought

Mia Silverio, Scott Galloway’s research lead, recently gave a behind-the-scenes look at how she produces compelling pieces. Galloway’s company, Prof G Media, has produced countless TED talks, podcasts, YouTube videos, and presentations from around the world, but many of the storytelling tips are the same. Even topics that don’t seem tailor-made for the internet like accounting can go viral with the right story, Silverio writes.

If you’re looking for ways to share your passion, we suggest you check out all the tips, but this one in particular felt apt:

Good stories teach us something new. Good storytellers cultivate the ability to see what others don’t.

I call this “zooming out.” Most people analyze events as if they’re looking through a camera lens, seeing only what’s in focus. Skilled storytellers pull back to capture the wider landscape, revealing potential causes and effects that were invisible in the close-up shot. Put differently, zooming out requires moving from the what happened layer of understanding to the so what? what made it possible? what happens next? Layers.

For more stories on coping with loss, explore the grief topic or the archive of Grief Book Club. You can also read stories about the milestones of Catharsis Chronicles, Crow’s Feet, or The Narrative Arc.






DOLLY

https://ew.com/dolly-parton-dead-11991711

https://ew.com/jane-fonda-dolly-parton-scolded-her-cross-eyed-photo-12075103

https://ew.com/kacey-musgraves-pays-tribute-to-dolly-parton-at-her-concert-12072622

https://ew.com/dolly-parton-and-carl-dean-inside-their-60-year-love-story-12068031






























Gloria Steinem, the journalist, organizer and cofounder of Ms. whose name became inseparable from the modern movement for women’s equality, died Wednesday, Sept. 2, at her home in New York City. She was 92.

 

(Jenny Warburg)

A statement posted by Steinem and Gloria’s Foundation said she died peacefully, surrounded by people who loved her, after working for equality until the end.

 

Those of us fortunate enough to know her will recognize another truth in that announcement: Her greatest gift was not simply the power of her own voice. It was her capacity to listen, to make another person feel seen, heard and capable of changing the world.

 

That is how Gloria Steinem led. She did not enter a room looking for followers. She looked for connections.

 

For more than half a century, the public knew her as one of feminism’s most recognizable figures: the writer with the center-parted hair and aviator glasses; the assured speaker at rallies, campuses and conventions; the tireless traveler who carried the movement’s ideas into living rooms and union halls, onto television screens and into the corridors of political power.

 

But Steinem understood something the culture surrounding her often did not: Movements are never made by one person.

 

She insisted that feminism’s history include the Black women, labor organizers, Indigenous women, lesbians, civil rights leaders and community activists whose work had too often been erased. She frequently credited women such as Florynce Kennedy, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, Fannie Lou Hamer, Pauli Murray and Shirley Chisholm with teaching and inspiring her. When the media attempted to anoint her the leader of a leaderless movement, she redirected attention toward the organizers, coalitions and collective action that made change possible.

 

Gloria Marie Steinem was born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, to Ruth Nuneviller Steinem and Leo Steinem. Her father was an antiques dealer whose work kept the family moving for much of Gloria’s early childhood.

 

After her parents separated, she remained with her mother, a former journalist who struggled with serious mental illness and with the economic and social penalties imposed on women who lacked financial independence.

 

Those experiences helped Gloria see early what American society preferred not to acknowledge: The circumstances of women’s lives were not merely personal. They were political, economic and structural.

 

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1956, Steinem spent two years in India on a Chester Bowles Fellowship. There, she encountered Gandhian organizing and learned lessons she would carry throughout her life about listening, traveling and building change from the ground up.

 

Returning to the United States, she struggled to find serious journalism assignments in an industry that routinely confined women to service articles and so-called women’s pages.

 

In 1962, Esquire published her examination of the impossible choice society imposed on women between career and family.

 

The following year, she went undercover as a Playboy bunny for Show magazine. Her two-part exposé revealed the exhausting labor, surveillance, sexual demands and degrading conditions concealed behind the Playboy Club’s glamorous image.

 

The investigation made her famous, but it also temporarily made editors less willing to take her seriously. That experience taught Steinem a lasting lesson about who determines which stories count as news, and about the cost women pay when men control the institutions that assign, edit, finance and distribute those stories.

 

In 1968, she helped found New York magazine and became one of its political columnists.

 

A year later, she attended an abortion speak-out in Greenwich Village. Listening to women publicly describe abortions they had been forced to obtain in secrecy, Gloria recognized her own experience among theirs.

 

At 22, she had obtained an abortion in London at a time when the procedure was largely illegal in the United States. She later described that gathering as the beginning of her life as an active feminist. It deepened her conviction that democracy is impossible without control over one’s own body—a conviction made even more urgent by the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the continuing campaign to criminalize abortion, contraception and those who provide or seek reproductive healthcare.

 

 In 1969, her essay “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation” helped bring her national attention. Soon she was traveling and speaking with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the pioneering Black feminist and community organizer. Their partnership offered a public demonstration of a truth Gloria emphasized throughout her life: Racism and sexism are interlocking systems, and neither can be defeated in isolation.

 

Gloria Steinem helped establish organizations that translated feminist ideas into durable political power. She was among the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Women’s Action Alliance, the Ms. Foundation for Women, Voters for Choice and, later, the Women’s Media Center. She supported international organizations including Equality Now and worked across generations, movements and national borders.

 

In 1971, Steinem and a collective of feminist journalists began the audacious project that became Ms. The preview issue appeared as an insert in New York magazine late that year. Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days, generating approximately 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 reader letters. The first regular issue followed in July 1972.

 

The response revealed an enormous community of women who had been told that their experiences were isolated, shameful or too insignificant to be news. In the pages of Ms., they discovered that what they had been experiencing alone was being experienced by millions.

 

The magazine’s founding editors and contributors did not simply add women to the existing news agenda. They changed the definition of news.

 

Ms. put abortion, sexual harassment and domestic violence on its cover when mainstream publications barely had language for them. It explained and championed the Equal Rights Amendment, evaluated presidential candidates on issues affecting women, published a groundbreaking national study of date rape and documented the pressure advertisers exerted over editorial decisions. It brought feminist analysis to politics, work, health, family, sexuality, culture, race and economic power.

 

It also opened its pages to argument and disagreement. Feminism was never a finished doctrine to Steinem. It was a living, self-questioning movement—a method of seeing connections that established power would rather keep hidden.

 

Like any public figure whose work spanned more than six decades, Gloria Steinem faced criticism and controversy. Some feminists objected to the media’s elevation of a white, conventionally attractive woman as the movement’s representative. Her 1998 defense of President Bill Clinton against allegations of sexual misconduct was heavily criticized; years later, she acknowledged she would not write the same piece again.

 

A truthful appreciation of Gloria Steinem should not turn a radical human being into a flawless monument. She evolved. She listened. She sometimes reconsidered. She understood that feminism requires the courage to confront not only the world’s failings, but our own.

 

Her books included Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Revolution From Within, Moving Beyond Words, My Life on the Road and The Truth Will Set You Free, but First It Will Piss You Off!

 

Her journalism and activism earned numerous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by President Barack Obama in 2013, and Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2021.

 

She married environmental and animal-rights activist David Bale in 2000. He died in 2003. Gloria did not have children and understood family expansively. Her life was filled with friends, fellow organizers, colleagues and generations of people whom she encouraged, connected and welcomed into the movement.

 

Her New York home became a meeting place where activists gathered in circles to talk, listen and plan. That image feels especially fitting. Even after becoming an icon, Gloria kept creating circles.

 

In 2001, Gloria came to Ellie Smeal and me to discuss the possibility of the Feminist Majority Foundation taking on the publication of Ms. She had rescued Ms. from a series of commercial publishers that had nearly killed the magazine, and it was now facing the headwinds of a rapidly changing media landscape.

 

I remember Gloria telling us that she had always believed Ms. should be published by a nonprofit within the feminist movement—free from corporate pressures and fiercely independent. We knew the important role Ms. had played in connecting feminists to one another and strengthening the movement, and we decided to rise to the challenge.

 

When Steinem and the other owners of Ms. entrusted the magazine to the Feminist Majority Foundation, we understood that we were being entrusted with far more than a publication. We were being asked to preserve an independent feminist institution, and to keep it alive, questioning and relevant for generations that would face battles we could not yet foresee.

 

That responsibility is more urgent today than at any time in recent memory.

 

We are living through a sustained assault on bodily autonomy. Books and curricula that tell the truth about race, gender and sexuality are being censored. Transgender people are being turned into political targets. Women’s rights defenders around the world face imprisonment and violence. Authoritarian movements understand that controlling women—and controlling the stories a society tells about women—is central to controlling democracy itself.

 

At the same time, the economic foundations of journalism are collapsing. Local newsrooms have disappeared. Corporate consolidation has narrowed the range of stories the public encounters. Social-media algorithms reward outrage, distortion and abuse, while technology billionaires can determine which journalism reaches an audience and which truths remain comfortably out of sight.

 

This is why Ms. still matters.

 

Ms. is not owned by a billionaire or beholden to commercial advertisers. It is an independent, nonprofit feminist newsroom sustained by Ms. partners, readers and donors. That model allows us to investigate stories advertisers may find inconvenient, to center people commercial media consider insufficiently profitable and to report on women not as a demographic niche but as full human beings whose freedom is inseparable from democracy.

 

Member-supported journalism is more than a financing mechanism. It is a relationship of trust. Our readers do not purchase influence over our journalism; they make independent journalism possible.

 

Today, in Gloria’s memory, we ask you to help sustain the independent feminist journalism she fought to protect. Please make a tax-deductible gift to Ms. to ensure this institution remains fearless, independent and available to the generations carrying her work forward.

HONOR GLORIA’S LEGACY: SUPPORT MS

Gloria understood from the beginning that feminism needed its own media—not because feminists should withdraw from the larger public conversation, but because independent media can introduce truths the mainstream has not yet learned to recognize. Again and again, subjects treated first as marginal “women’s issues” in Ms. became national questions: domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape within marriage, reproductive freedom, pay inequity, childcare, the feminization of poverty and the political consequences of gender-based violence.

 

The need for that work did not die with Gloria. It has multiplied.

 

Gloria’s forthcoming memoir, An Unexpected Life, will be published posthumously on Sept. 22. Its title captures something essential about her. She resisted the narrow scripts written for women and helped millions of others imagine lives beyond them.

 

But the most important monument to Gloria will not be a statue, an award or even a shelf of remarkable books. It will be the work we—working together—do next.

 

It will be every person who organizes instead of surrendering to isolation. Every journalist who asks whose voice is missing. Every reader who supports independent media. Every young person who discovers that an injustice bearing down on her life is neither natural nor inevitable. That’s how the circle grows wider.

 

Gloria changed the story women were permitted to tell about themselves.  Now it’s our responsibility to keep telling the truth—and to make certain that no billionaire, advertiser, government or algorithm can silence it.

 

Rest in power, Gloria.

Kathy Spillar, executive editor and the editors of Ms.


















Gloria Steinem, trailblazing feminist activist and pop culture icon, dies at 92

“She continued working for equality until the very end,” her family shared in a statement on her social media pages.





Gloria Steinem, a trailblazer of the feminist movement, pop culture shaper, and co-founder of Ms. magazine, died Wednesday at her home in New York City, her foundation announced across her social media pages on Thursday morning. She was 92.

A statement from her family and the Gloria Steinem Foundation notes she was “surrounded by some of the many who loved her.”

“Gloria’s near-century on earth were years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end,” it reads. “Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard. Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor.”

In lieu of flowers, Steinem’s posthumous wish is for donations to her foundation.

Gloria Steinem attends the Ms. Foundation Women of Vision Awards: Celebrating Generations of Progress & Power at Ziegfeld Ballroom on May 16, 2023 in New York City
Gloria Steinem attending the Ms. Foundation Women of Vision Awards.

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty


Steinem became a prominent figure of the women’s liberation movement in the back half of the 20th century. She relentlessly fought for equal rights, breaking down stereotypes, promoting inclusion and media representation, and working for social justice. She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1974 as the first major publication to be owned, run, and written by women.

Among her many achievements, Steinem co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971, an organization that supports and trains women seeking positions in public office. That same year, she helped found the Women’s Action Alliance, which provides practical support for women fighting against sex discrimination.

The Gloria Steinem Foundation now exists to maintain her New York City residence as a permanent site of the feminist movement, having housed many formative gatherings that contributed to women’s liberation.

American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem speaks at a rally outside the United Nations, New York, New York, 1978
Gloria Steinem speaks at a rally outside the United Nations in 1978.

Bettye Lane/Photo Researchers History/Getty


Steinem’s influence on culture was so prominent that she was welcomed time and again by Hollywood. She appeared as herself in the short-lived 1995 TV drama New York News, in which she has lunch with her friend Nan Chase (Madeline Kahn), a celebrity columnist. One of her most famous cameos would come a year later in the film The First Wives Club, starring Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, and Diane Keaton.

Steinem’s most recent Hollywood moment was a season 2 appearance on Sex and the City successor series And Just Like That. Star Sarah Jessica Parker, who also appeared in The First Wives Club, was a big supporter of Steinem’s work.

Multiple actresses portrayed the activist and icon on screen. In 2020, Rose Byrne played Steinem on FX series Mrs. America. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Byrne admitted wanting to back out of the job initially as she found it “daunting” to shed “fresh light on a person so iconic.”

“[Gloria’s] the most well-known of the feminists,” the actress said. “She has so much agency in her voice. I was so nervous that I would stuff it up. Someone like that, too, people project so much onto [them].”

Gloria Steinem speaks onstage during Visionary Women celebrates Gloria Steinem in conversation with Cleo Wade at the Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel on November 18, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California
Gloria Steinem speaks at the Visionary Women conversation in California.

Rachel Murray/Getty



That same year, Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, and Lulu Wilson all played Steinem in the film The Glorias, which chronicled her story at various stages of her life. Steinem herself then appears at the very end for a scene that unites all the versions of herself together.

“She spent her recent years doing the two things she loved most: being in community with others and writing,” the family and foundation’s statement reads. “She has welcomed hundreds of guests into her living room for Talking Circles, a tradition she insisted will continue long after she is no longer with us.”

The statement also quotes a line from Steinem’s upcoming book, An Unexpected Life: “I have now lived for more than 50 years in this brownstone, in rooms that have witnessed lives before mine, and will know others after I am gone.”

“Gloria loved the tradition of lighting signal fires on hills to light the way to the other side of the mountain,” the message concludes. “Lighting your own candle for Gloria makes you part of this global and celestial community circle.”


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2609.05 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 4083 days ago & DAD = 737 days ago


- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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