The whole planet was dancing this weekend. One humongous, gyrating mass of human beings grooving together with Billie Jean, with Dirty Diana, with Ben. Fifty of the most triumphant and simultaneously excruciating years one human being can spend on this earth, ended in an instant on June 25th. Our beloved Michael Jackson is gone. We are shocked, we are heartbroken, but we ain’t gonna cry.
When John Lennon passed, I was young so had to ask my stepdad what the big deal was. He said, “it would be like if Michael Jackson died.” Back then, I didn’t know how death made you see in a flash the moments between a person first coming into your world and when they leave forever, condensing those moments into an irretrievable period that reminds you of the brevity of life. I didn’t understand how the death of a young person snips away what could have been a glorious future, leaving you to mourn both what you’ve lost and what you’ll never have. All I knew was that Michael Jackson being removed from the planet would be one of the worst things to happen.
Decades later, I’m an adult forced to process the death of a person who was both a stranger and a constant presence. Michael Jackson was a mess of contradictions. He wasn’t only talented, but genius. He wasn’t merely eccentric, he was bizarre. More than just strange-looking, he became extraterrestrial. He was as astonishingly asocial as he was loving.
But he was also an unearthly creature who could move like an acrobat, a ballerina and a machine gun all at once. A singer who sounded like an angel and a sprite. A supernova brilliant enough to have the entire planet follow his every move, yet generous enough to try and heal it. A being who crossed every bridge humanity has built to keep us from each other – racially, economically, artistically, even sexually. Michael Jackson was too big to die.
Alas, our hero was mortal and the man is gone. But his extraordinary work is eternal. And really, what Michael’s life was all about during this half-century love affair was his art. With his passing, the world forgot about the monster the media and the man himself worked to create, and got back the Michael Jackson we adored. Seeing once more the smiling boy singing “I Want You Back” on Ed Sullivan still makes our hearts skip a beat. The opening of “Billie Jean” is as miraculous as the first time we heard it. The moonwalk is as jaw-dropping as the day we watched as kids.
The Saturday following his death was gorgeous in Boston. As a friend and I walked through the streets, the news about Michael was on everyone’s lips, his songs were on every radio station in boutiques and coming at us through the rolled down windows of every passing car. A Latino man blasted “Thriller” from his radio, my black friend and I danced on the street and were waved at by an older white woman shimmying her hips across the way. In the evening, we went to the greatest dance party ever, where Michael and his brothers dominated the playlist. The entire day was a reminder of what was special about the man. No matter who you were, when Michael Jackson was on, you had to move, there was no choice, dancing was imperative. And when his music played, you couldn’t stop smiling. This is what Michael Jackson gave to us. Joy, love, connection and music. And so we celebrate not only his life, but our own.
In an interview, Michael admitted to feeling at ease only on stage. Around other people, not so much. All he wanted was to entertain, to be loved by us in a way he never seemed to be loved by another person. But his eccentricities and crimes pushed his audience away. Understandably, we made him a freak and an exile. We branded him irrelevant, the truest way to kill an artist.
But if you’ve been around long enough, you know people don’t do bad things because they’re evil, but because they’ve got a lot of pain. Of course, your allegiances lie with the victims, but one can’t help but feel for someone whose life has been horrific. And so, part of this celebratory funeral for Michael Jackson is about forgiveness.
I don’t want to be sad, in part, because I believe Michael Jackson sought in life the kind of release he now knows in death. I’m sad for the people in his life who truly loved him, and hope there were many. I’m sad he never had the chance to redeem himself. But I’m thankful he was with us.
I have trouble with the concept of an afterlife and am still struggling to decide what happens to the spirit when it leaves the body. But right now, I hope there is a Heaven and that this phenomenally gifted, phenomenally generous, phenomenally tortured person can see us down here singing and grooving to his music.
Yes, you meant something to us, Michael. We were moved by your story and your work. We do love you. And will never stop dancing.
[...] : Goodbye, Michael… [...]
I can’t stop reading about Michael Jackson. In life you see people acting in the most bizarre ways in life and somehow dismiss them. I suppose we have enough going on in our own lives to give over some of our precious, scarce energy and stretch our hand, listen, understand… It’s easier to say to ourselves that we don’t get them, don’t understand, don’t want to intrude… It is. I’m not judging, it just is.
I didn’t know Michael Jackson and could not realistically reach out to him, but the event of his death does make me think of people close to me whom I feel I should sync with in times of difficulty. People who I believe are hurting and for whom that hurt hides the forest for the trees. Now I am reminded once again that it is better to lose a friend for trying, than to lose a human being for not trying.
Some people are beyond “repair”, as may have been Michael Jackson’s case. It seems like he was on a downward spiral for a long time and nothing, not even his love for his children (in my book, the truest test), could keep him among us. I am sure friends and family tried to reach out to him… the extreme pain of his life was probably too embedded in his everyday. It really was a agonizingly BIG life.
Not having inner peace is just about the most horrible thing that can happen to a person. With inner peace all traumas become bearable, somehow. We are able to feel love, not just the one we give, but the one we receive, and that fuels us. Michael Jackson was indeed deeply troubled, but he was also immensely loved, adored, revered… It appears that he had such inner turmoil that he was unable to channel that into anything positive. Instead it seems he evaded it through numbing his pain in every way possible, until the numbness took over and sucked the life out of him.
Unfortunately, inner peace is not something you can give someone, people have to reach it on their own. For some it requires tons of willpower and work. Real work. Excruciating work.
… back in my own “little” world, this screams in my ear that that when you care for people, you really have to do all you can to reach out. We all have our demons, big and small. Some are more apparent than others, some more asphyxiating than others. But people need to know that you are there to shine a light as they swim through the dark waters of their hurt. As they toil to find that inner peace everyone talks about.
I’ve been watching the very moving tributes to Michael Jackson on TV. I can’t begin to tell you what he has meant to me. In our hours or grief what is important now is the kids. Michael’s kids. What would Michael want? I think we can agree there’s one thing he would want: that whoever gains custody of those kids will honor his parenting skills by keeping the kids’ faces covered with handkerchiefs or beekeeper hoods or whatever. Anything less would be a rebuke to the King of Pop.
What a country! First Michael, now Sarah. It’s just one freak show after another!
Beautiful blog post. The entirety of MJ’s life was “awesome” in the true sense of the word. He was amazingly talented in his youth, his later eccentricities were equally striking, and then in an equally shocking instant he was gone.
He’s not gone. Just yesterday someone reported seeing him at Burger King.