Loretta Lynn‘s family is keeping the memory of her late son, Jack Benny Lynn, alive.
On the 41st anniversary of Jack’s death on Tuesday (July 22), a remembrance of him was posted to her social media account, along with a call to fans to keep sharing memories of him as well as their own late loved ones.
“[Lynn] thought it so important to remember and talk about the loved ones we’ve lost,” the reflection reads.
“If you’ve lost, we hope you take time to share your story and theirs,” it continues.
“It matters.”
To celebrate Jack’s memory, Lynn’s social media account features several photos of him, both from childhood, as well as later in life.
The post also shared a reflection Lynn wrote in 2022, on the 38th anniversary of Jack’s death.
In that piece, she admitted that it “about killed me” when he died, and it was her decision to keep posting in his memory, year after year.
“He’s been gone now longer than we had him,” Lynn wrote at the time. “I still love him more than ever. Thirty-eight years can’t lessen a momma’s love.”
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Lynn herself died in October 2022, just a few months after she penned that emotional remembrance of her son. But in the years since, her family has continued to acknowledge the painful loss she suffered each year.
“It was the hardest event of our mom’s life,” the newest post reads. “She was never the same afterwards.”
A Life Cut Short
Jack Benny Lynn was born in December 1949. He was Lynn’s second-born child, and her first son.
A blacksmith who trained horses, Jack was working on the Lynn family’s Hurricane Mills Ranch when he attempted to ford Duck River on horseback and drowned. The tragedy occurred on July 22, 1984.
He was the first of Lynn’s six children to die, but sadly, he wouldn’t be the only child the country legend would lose during her lifetime.
Betty Sue Lynn, Lynn’s first child and Jack’s older sister, died of emphysema in 2013.
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