Bye, Bye Michael

Like many, I was cynical about today’s memorial service for Michael Jackson. I thought for sure that this would be way over the top, that they were deifying this troubled man and making a mass media spectacle in a slower-than-average summer news week.

Yet after watching this unfold on CNN, just like the tens of thousands of fans who didn’t pull up that lucky email, I must say that the memorial was a moving and poignant event, tastefully produced and heartrendingly delivered.

This memorial service gave an accurate, unwavering picture of who Michael Jackson was not only in American culture but on the world stage. It is important to understand that this man’s performing career lasted an incredible 38 years—longer than Elvis and more than four times that of the Beatles.

One of my own very first albums was a Jackson 5 record. Ironically, I don’t think I remembered this until I watched the memorial. How I loved the voice even then, like sugar, that sweet.

In a sense, part of me died when Michael died. My brothers and I loved this music—affluent white kids listening to music from a black family from the poor outskirts of Chicago. There was no way to listen to it and not be touched. His voice gave a sense of immediacy and warmth right there in that room with you, wherever you were. And as I grew, Michael was there in the soundtrack, in the dance numbers, the ballads, the videos, the sensual moves, the soaring voice, the seductive call, the plaintive whisper. Not only with his dynamic presence, but in the way he told kids everywhere that it’s OK to be sensitive, to be vulnerable, to be multisided, to be black, to be gay, to be androgynous, to be human. And what a tragic and paradoxical figure he became. Yet nothing that happened to Michael in his later years could diminish that feeling of humanness he always evoked.

So watching performers and celebrities, civil rights leaders and talking heads, preachers and pastors from around the world come out and literally sing his praises, I suddenly realized this was right. This was the right action for a man who did so much right and so much good in the world.

The world saw and heard his children for the first time. It was impossible to listen to that pretty little girl speak about losing her daddy and not feel tears well up inside. Having lost my own father suddenly at the age of 12, I know that pain. I know that pain.

I’m glad that I got this chance to feel a farewell to Michael. I know that now, more than ever, our collective innocence is gone. A light went out on earth. But if indeed there is a heaven, a star is shining there forever.