I remember it like yesterday. I was on the train....on my way home. Cell rang. It was Tee. She said "Did you hear Michael Jackson had a heart attack?" I had not...and frankly, I didn't believe her. It was just too.....unbelievable. Unfathomable. Unreal. Could not be real. By the time I got home and turned on the news to confirm it was all just a bad joke....he was dead. Confirmed dead. I screamed at the television. "Noooooo!!!!" It was all I could say. Michael Jackson and DEAD? No place in my consciousness for that.
Yes, of course...I know that eventually everyone dies...but some people are so "larger than life", you almost expect them to be around forever. And I'm not talking in the philosophical "he'll live on through his music" sense. I mean a lot of us can't imagine some people i.e. stars, dying. More evidence of deifying humans...putting regular folks (even SUPER talented ones) on pedestals...that they can't help but fall headlong off of simply because they are HUMAN. They will disappoint eventually....either by being crackheads, cheaters who have babies outside of their marriages, liars, closet this & that or overall bad decision makers that put their very charmed lives in danger.
When Michael Jackson died, we mourned in our house for at least 6 months. This included blastin' the History Album over and over, scouring the internet for rare interviews of MJ....spending hours on Saturdays watching said rare interviews, his music videos, and anything JACKSON (including his brothers' reality show)...and of course "schooling" our nieces and nephews that came to visit on MJ. This meant they had to watch Thriller, whether they wanted to or not.
Our mourning was not because Michael Jackson THE KING OF POP died. It was because Michael Jackson, our buddy who we had so many memories with...who was like family...had died. And he left way too early. The fact that they found his doctor guilty of causing his death today doesn't really do much for me. MJ is still gone. sigh. I guess this is how my parents felt when Marvin Gaye died....
bite of the day ~ He wasn't perfect, but he was ours.
thirtiesgirl
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