The things we try to hide in life come out in death—unresolved conflicts, long-held regrets, dark secrets. No matter how far we run from these demons, they have a way of coming back to haunt us on our deathbed. If we die with unfinished business, it becomes the burden of loved ones left behind. Wounds created by the dying aren’t erased by their death. Sometimes, they cut deeper. The urge to run away from our secrets only demonstrates the power they have over us.
What if we practiced saying the scary thing, owning the shitty thing, showing up to the challenging thing? It’s daunting work to be done on the deathbed, so why not take our opportunities in life? A big part of embracing our mortality means reconciling our relationships. When looking at yourself on your deathbed in your mind’s eye, who is around you? Who is choosing to be there? Who is choosing not to be there and why? It’s important to acknowledge the difficult relationships we’ve had and the tricky emotions they bring. Acknowledging our resentment, anger, betrayal, and rejection to ourselves is a solid place to begin. And it’s even more helpful if we can address it with the people who have caused or received it. Sometimes it’s just too late. Nearing the end of life, I have observed that people are concerned with three major questions:
Who did I love?
How did I love?
Was I loved?
The answers are as varied as the individual lives themselves. But they point to the truth. From the minute we are recognized as humans—whether at conception, in the womb, or at birth—we begin leaving a legacy. We leave a legacy with every word, every smile, every action, and every inaction. It’s not optional. Our legacies can be big or small. What matters is that we will all touch someone. How we do it is up to us.
When we die, that legacy will be revealed. The results are not always positive.
A few years ago, I read an obituary that took my breath away. The surviving children of a woman who died absolutely obliterated their mother, for the whole world to read. She had been torturous to them their entire childhoods and continued her abuse of them as adults, exposing everyone she met to her evil, violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and “hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.” They wrote, in part, “we celebrate her death from this earth and hope she lives in the afterlife reliving each gesture of violence, cruelty, and shame that she delivered on her children.” I had never read anything so scathing or rooted in deep agony.
The obituary appeared in print and online only briefly before it was removed. I will never know why it was taken down, but I wonder if having it out there, even momentarily, gave some modicum of closure and peace to the woman’s children, signaling their nightmare was over. Perhaps it could also have been taken down because of the caustic nature of their feelings, which highlight a societal taboo: we are not to speak ill of the dead. When we can’t say something nice, we are taught to say nothing at all. This suppresses the very human need to grieve difficult relationships.
While I’ve certainly seen a few in my work as a death doula, it’s rare that people welcome death knowing that they’ve wronged others without attempting to make some type of amends. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s just too late.
I’ve also sat with clients who tearfully confessed to me that they didn’t know what to do with their feelings about an estranged family member who was dying, even if there was an attempt at reconciliation. They wanted to know: How do we mourn when someone with a troubled legacy leaves this earth?
When Janet first calls me, she is lighthearted, professional, and straight to the point. It is clear that she wants to handle some business, and I’m surprised when I learn the heaviness of it. After his referral to hospice, her dying father, James, revealed to her that he has five additional children that she never knew about. As the only child of her mother and father, who were married, Janet, forty-two, is frustrated, hurt, and angry. And now James wants her to work with her newly revealed siblings to coordinate his needs at the end of his life.
My reaction can be summed up in one word: Eek! I’ve never been called to support such dense family dynamics, and this feels way outside the scope of my work, more a job for a mediator or family therapist than a death doula. There are always family disputes at the end of life, but until this moment, I’ve never dealt with newly discovered siblings, secret mistresses, hidden families.
The siblings are all aware that his life will soon be ending. James wants peace, Janet tells me—both within himself for the secrets he’s kept during his life, and also among his children. Ironically, his need for peace has caused turmoil in Janet. She’d assumed that she would be the one to make his end of life decisions, manage his finances, and plan his burial and services. But now she has to coordinate with five strangers toward whom she already holds animosity—through no fault of theirs. Janet is also grateful that she hasn’t had to discuss any of this with her mother, who died nine years prior. She’s angry with her father, who has tried to explain his decision, but—understandably—nothing he says is good enough.
“I don’t know how I’m going to do this, Alua. He’s dying and now I have to clean up his fucking mess.” Elsewhere in our conversation, Janet has been cool and collected about the situation she’s found herself in, but the facade has dropped.
I have no idea what to say. Acknowledge and validate, I remind myself. I try to imagine what it would feel like to be a daughter learning this about her father, and find that I cannot do it. Rather than rely on empathy, I choose compassion. “That’s completely understandable,” I manage. “This is a tough situation.”
“I need to talk to them but don’t know how,” Janet continues. “I don’t want anything to do with them, and at this moment I don’t want anything to do with him. But I don’t have a choice. I’m not going to abandon him on his deathbed. How are we going to do this?” Even in her anger and frustration, she is still using we to include everyone, and I think she also means me.
In this situation, I am in over my head. I offer to help her find a mediator or a family therapist, but Janet insists she wants to work with me. So I offer the skills I have. “Would it help if I explained the duties which arise at the end of life to all of you together and help you decide which ones you’d like to take on?”
“Yes.” She pauses. “I think.”
We arrange a sibling video meeting online where they will listen to the different duties necessary to wrap up a life and figure out who will take on which responsibility. Foolishly, I allot only an hour on a Saturday afternoon for this work of a lifetime.
Our intention for the meeting is education and collaboration, and we start with introductions. Some of the siblings know of each other, and a few have met, but none are friendly. My quick math determines that some were born when others were in utero or very young. They range in age from almost fifty to their thirties. All were born during James’s marriage to Janet’s mother. It is, in every sense of the word, a clusterfuck.
Before everyone gets a chance to talk, tensions are running high. There is a lot of huffing, puffing, and eye rolling. The Grief Olympics have commenced. The Grief Olympics result when someone insists that they are hurting more than someone else because of the circumstances of a death. They often begin with “at least you . . .”
It is a resentment chorus, with each singing the refrain louder than the next. From my outsider’s perspective, they are all entitled to their grief just as it is. Everyone is. There is no gold medalist in grief. To regroup, I call for a break to reset the energy. We are only twenty minutes into the meeting. It is going south fast.
I immediately call Janet and offer the number of a mediator I’ve used before in case she wants to scrap the whole thing. This feels voyeuristic and I’m out of my league, but I can’t leave them like this. Their collective pain is more than I know how to handle, and I fear I am making the situation worse. Janet strongly disagrees and she wants me to stay in the conversation. She wants to hear how the others feel about her father’s death. She wants to handle what her father hadn’t during his life. She doesn’t want to bear his death alone. And she thinks I can hold it all. Thirty jumping jacks later, we get back on the video call with a game plan.
As we begin, I ask each sibling to remember that the other is grieving, and that we have a common goal. Then I turn it over to Janet, who thanks them for their presence and admits that she’s held a feeling of superiority since she is the only “legitimate” child. The Grief Olympics threaten to get started again when the oldest sibling chimes in with a claim to the longest relationship with their father, but Janet disarms it with an apology—a whole hero. Tensions subside. They listen to Janet’s sadness over the impending death, but also her relief at finally having people to shoulder the responsibility of her father with her. Only children bear a particular weight when their parents die. Slowly they each share their grief at not having relationships with each other and their frustrations with their father for not introducing them earlier. They’ve found a common ground. An hour and twenty minutes into the meeting, we finally have an opening to discuss what we’ve gathered for.
They are all clear that they want to honor James’s decision to die at home. Since Janet has had extensive conversations with him about his medical treatment and lives in the same city, it is agreed that she will be assigned his medical power of attorney. She will move in and provide care, receiving respite from a sibling who lives in the neighboring town. When talk of his financial power of attorney comes up, everyone bristles, until it is agreed that the accountant sibling should be listed on the forms, while all the financial decisions will be made in concert. I don’t offer to facilitate those calls because I value my peace of mind.
Two and a half hours in, we are finally making progress, with many small duties left to divvy up.
Nearing the end of the call, one sibling asks whether their mother would be allowed to come to the service. She’d had a romantic relationship with James and wants to say goodbye. Janet seethes. She’s barely begun to reconcile that she has siblings and doesn’t want to also have to come face-to-face with these women who are not her mother. After a strained exchange, they agree that their mothers can come if they want, as long as everyone agrees to remain peaceful. This is particularly painful for Janet, as her mother is no longer alive. Yet it is also a relief that her mother won’t have to suffer the sight of the physical representations of her husband’s infidelity. It would have been grief on grief on grief.
Almost four hours and many snack and jumping jacks breaks later, the goodbye has all the softness of a Brillo pad, but at least we were done. I’m amazed that they all stayed on the call.
Each sibling now has their individual work of grief ahead, plus the roles we’d assigned during the call. They each also have to start reconciling the secrets their father kept over his life and their individual paths to forgiveness. Or not. The death of someone does not require that we forgive them if it doesn’t serve us. As long as we are at peace with the choice we have made, that’s all that matters.
Two weeks later, Janet calls to let me know that her father died surrounded by the love and laughter of four of his six children at his bedside. They didn’t have a chance to get much of his paperwork done or handle all his affairs, but they did start forming relationships. She is surprised to see her father’s walk mimicked by one of her siblings and agrees to mentor a nephew. Together, they got to accompany the man who gave them all life to his death.
When someone dies who has hurt us, it’s hard or confusing to know how to hold both grief and anger, or sorrow and relief. Or to give yourself permission to feel those feelings in different measures. Not everyone is sad when someone dies. Some are relieved. Not every loss is a loss, and grief doesn’t always look like sadness. We need to make room for other responses to death, not just sadness and despair, to honor the lushness of the human experience.
Legacies of pain and hurt don’t always look the same. For example, my client Jack, eighty-eight, was a raging racist. He was also beloved by his family, who hired me.
Jack’s sons, Andrew and John, call me with a disagreement about whether or not their father needs additional pain medication. Their wives have encouraged them to get my take.
Jack has been complaining about pain to his son John, who just wants him to be comfortable. Because he isn’t presenting any signs of pain, however, Andrew’s worried about potential opiate addiction. Both seem genuinely concerned about their father, and treat the other with respect, but neither will budge. In the background of the phone call, I can hear Jack moaning in frustration.
After making sure Andrew and John are clear that death doulas do not administer pain medication because it is medical treatment, and that I will defer to what the doctors suggest, they insist on hiring me. They want help understanding the next steps, and they want to get on the same page. I agree to come meet them. Andrew greets me warmly in a light blue, button-down shirt and khaki pants outside the chain-link fence of Jack’s house with a sheepish look that immediately puts me on alert. “I really should have told you before you came,” he says, “but my dad is kinda racist.”
I look at him blankly and try to take in this huge fucking fact that he neglected to mention. He knows I’m Black. He could have saved me the hour and a half drive outside of Los Angeles and whatever emotional gymnastics I’ll have to perform to get through this.
“Kinda racist?” I ask. “A little racist is a whole racist as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t agree to this.” I’ve got limited time on Earth and prefer to not spend any of it with people for whom my mere existence evokes hatred.
“I know. I’m sorry.” He appears genuinely pained. “We didn’t know what else to do and we didn’t think anyone else could help us. Plus, you’re just going to talk to us, right?”
I purse my lips, take a deep breath, and take stock. He’s right that I am here to support the sons, and I’ve already driven the whole way. I am seething, but I agree to go inside only to talk to Andrew and John. Jack is sleeping in the living room, so Andrew suggests we go in through the back door, reminiscent of the help in a not-so-long-ago time in America.
“No way. This isn’t 1929. I’m going in the front door.” I’m curt and already regretting my decision to stay. Squirming, Andrew quickly recognizes his mistake and apologizes.
I barely remember their home. My eyes shoot daggers toward the bed in the living room as soon as we walk in, hyper-focused on this old sleeping man whom I’m aware hates everyone who looks like me. There is a perception of death doulas as full of lavender and lace, but I’m not. I’m more lapis lazuli and lamé. People think that we are angels because of the work we do, but my sisters and ex-boyfriends would laugh in your face at the suggestion that I’m an angel. If you don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you. Plain and simple. I’ll send love your way, but from afar. I’m still human.
In the kitchen I sit at the table near the window and try not to fume. They offer me tea, which I decline. I’m here to do a job, after all, and get out. There is a tablecloth with lemons printed on it and a bowl of aging fruit in the center, littered with random papers, notepads, and pill bottles. This table could fit in any home where someone is seriously ill and dying: everyone handling tasks, forgetting to eat. John, dressed like his brother’s twin but in a white button-down shirt, is happy to see me and offers an equally empty apology. He knows what they have done is reprehensible. They have invited me into a space that is violent to me and serves their own good without concern for mine. They’ve either never heard of consent or don’t care. This is whiteness at its most opportunistic.
I try to get straight to the point so I can get out of hell’s kitchen. They tell me that the doctor is fine giving Jack additional medication. But he is already at a high dosage of opiates, and Andrew is concerned about addiction. I talk them through a cost-benefit risk analysis—risk of addiction (very low) versus further pain (high), complications versus comfort. The hospice nurse has just arrived, and I wonder if she has some info that I haven’t heard yet.
After Andrew gets permission from Jack for the hospice nurse to talk to me, she explains that Jack has an obstruction in his bowels that might be causing him pain. I watch silently as she palpates his abdomen. He barely winces. She moves her hands and pushes down harder. No grimace, no moan. She asks how he is doing. He says he is fine, but then immediately asks when he will get his opiates. This language is unusual to me. Most people would usually just call it “medicine.”
The hospice nurse asks about his level of pain and Jack immediately says it’s at a nine out of ten. I’m surprised, because it certainly doesn’t look like the racist is in pain. However, a person’s subjective experience of pain is not for another to judge. Pain is as it is reported. Disbelieving reported pain is one of the main factors contributing to Black people’s lack of access to pain management and to Black maternal mortality. When someone says they are in pain, emotional or physical, believe them. I choose to believe him.
The nurse busies herself preparing Jack’s transdermal pain patches and cleaning his skin to attach them to his abdomen. I avert my eyes to offer some privacy but inside, I wish he were on display like the Hottentot Venus. While I only agreed to talk to his sons, I’ve already agreed to help, so I commit to doing my job as thoroughly as possible. Against my better judgment, this means talking to Jack. When the nurse is done, she heads into the kitchen with Jack’s sons to give us some privacy. I hear them start to whisper.
Jack’s eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks are ruddy from years of alcoholism and illness. Deep brown and purple liver spots color his body and his lips are cracked, chapped, and a little bluish. I take a deep breath. “Do you know why I’m here?”
He glances at me with disdain, then looks away. “Yes, but I don’t know what you think you’ll be able to do for me.” His voice sounds like a lifetime of whiskey and cigarettes. “They said you were going to make sure I got my opiates. But I didn’t realize you were a colored girl.” For a man with red and purple spots, blue lips, and white hair, he’s got some nerve calling me colored. I’m a deep chocolate brown everywhere, including where the sun don’t shine. Realizing that at eighty-eight years old, this is likely the language and terminology he is most accustomed to, I’m trying to be understanding and compassionate. But it still fucking pisses me off. He knows better. He must.
“Yes. I am Black. And that’s got nothing to do with how I do my job, which has nothing to do with whether or not you get the medicine. I’m not a doctor and the nurse just gave you a patch.”
“Then what are you doing in my house?”
Breathe, Alua. Fix your face, Alua. I’m trying to appear calm on the outside, but inside I’m fighting him. “Your sons and nurse tell me that you’re in pain. I’m sorry about that.” This is a lie. In reality I wish he were getting stabbed by a million needles in his eyeballs while kicked in the kneecaps by donkeys. “They also tell me that you’re dying. Are you thinking much about that?”
He scoffs. “What do you think? I can’t go anywhere, and I can’t do anything. All day long I lay here doing jack shit but thinking that I’m going to die. It’s something everyone has to do at some point, and I guess it’s just my turn. But you should already understand that.” He enunciates every word as though I’m five years old. He hasn’t looked back at me.
Breathe, Alua. Fix your face, Alua. “I do understand that, but I also understand that knowing that you’re dying can come with a lot of emotions, and some of them are unpleasant. Are you having any of those?”
“What is this navel-gazing bullshit? I don’t want to think about the fact that I am dying. I don’t want you asking me anything about death. I don’t want to talk about it. And I don’t want to talk to you. I just want my opiates.” There’s that word again. “If you can’t get them for me, then get the fuck out of my house.” Spittle flies out of his hateful mouth along with his hateful words, as he finally turns to look at me full-on.
Breathe, Alua. Fix your face, Alua. I take another deep breath and consider if I should engage. This is a weighing act every Black person I know does when interfacing with white America. I want to curse him out and tell him that I hope he gags on a bag of dicks on his joyride to the underworld. But I also want to preserve my internal peace, which this man is threatening to disrupt. If I leave, have I let him win? If I stay and engage, angry and vengeful, have I let him win? He won’t win. Not today, Satan.
What is happening with Jack and his desire for opiates is clear to me. He is in deep emotional, psychic, and existential pain. He doesn’t want to be around for his dying. Plus, he is hateful. That hurts him more than it will ever hurt me. It is eating him alive from the inside. Given his bowel obstruction, he is literally full of shit.
Without answering him, I head back into the kitchen to Andrew and John, who sit at the table looking like lost congressional aides. I’ve gotten all of the information I need and taken all the abuse I have capacity for. Andrew and John stand suddenly and look at me in alarm. I guess I haven’t adequately fixed my face.
“What happened?!” John asks, aghast.
My words careen out of my mouth as fast as I can speak them so I can leave. “Your father is a hateful, angry, and scared man. I believe he is clear he is dying but does not want to be around for the process. You said he was addicted to opiates when he came back from the Korean War? Right?”
They both look at me, dumbfounded.
“Right??” I ask again with force, and they nod fast. “He likely medicated the pain from the war with his opiates then and is probably medicating the pain of facing his death now. He keeps asking for ‘opiates’ rather than pain medication. And I think he knows he has to report that he is in pain in order to get his opiates.” I pause. “Anything else?” I grab my bag, sitting next to the fruit bowl on the table. A dozen fruit flies scatter away.
I’m done and I’m angry. I’m angry with them for asking Black-ass me to come, knowing that their father hates people with my skin. I am angry at this country. But I am angriest with myself for agreeing to do it anyway.
“So should we give him the medication? Won’t he get addicted?” Andrew asks.
I throw up my hands. “He’s dying anyway. I can’t tell you what to do. But I’ve told you what I think. And now I’m ready to leave. Out of the front door.”
I cry frustrated tears on the drive home. I hate the duplicity with which Jack’s sons brought me into his space and I’m angry at myself for softening my boundaries. Just because I am a helper does not mean that I put myself in any ole situation when I can help. Sometimes it causes me more harm than good. Before being confronted with a racist client, I would have told you that I’d never do it. But I have just done it. I wonder if I have unconsciously made myself small to make white people comfortable, yet again.
I quickly shake my head and am reminded to honor the holiness of my no. It is just as powerful as my yes. Jack forces me to find my edges and boundaries in this work that means so much to me. This is a major step for anyone who chooses death work.
Andrew’s wife calls me while I’m on the road. I clear my throat and adjust my voice so she can’t hear my pain. It sickens me when white people know that they’ve caused me pain because of my race. She has spoken to her husband and her voice drips with apology about what her father-in-law said to me and who he is. She also tells me that Andrew and John have agreed to give Jack additional pain medication and have communicated it to him. Upon hearing the news that I was able to help give him what he wanted, racist, angry Jack sings my Black praises. He calls me an angel and a “sweet girl.” How quickly I turned from someone not worthy to be in his house to someone to celebrate when he got what he wanted from me. Typical.
I never saw Jack again. And I’ve never accepted another client whose beliefs included hate. I won’t do that to myself again.
Even as I despised Jack and the way he treated me, I could see how much he was loved. To me, Jack was a monster. My stomach turned thinking about how much power he wielded in the military and what he did with it. But to others, he was a father, a grandfather, a fellow soldier, a friend, and—most important—a human being. His legacy is much greater than his hatred of Black people, but this is the Jack that I met. Even with my personal animus toward him, choosing to hold Jack only in his hatred diminishes the totality of who he was as a human—his light and his darkness. And I don’t believe in throwing humans away. Anger and compassion don’t mix. Compassion calls me to forgive him.
I am reluctant to answer that call, but I do not know his whole story, his history, his glowing qualities, the loving words people said at his funeral, and the deep grief they felt when he was gone. I do know that people who hurt us eventually die, and sometimes the grief is convoluted when we loved them despite their worst parts.
As I seek to understand these contradictions, I ask myself: When have I been guilty of loving someone who might have been hurting others? The capacity to hurt others, after all, is as human as the capacity to be hurt. Each of us, at some point in our lives, has found ourselves struggling with this complicated love.
Speaking of which.
Michael Jackson was my first crush. He was my first inspiration, my first idol. He was also my first impactful death. Sometimes it feels like I’ve never felt a love as pure as my childhood love of the man they called the King of Pop.
Michael Jackson could do everything. He floated above the ground, which lit up when he touched it. His melodies were pure, as was his voice, and he transmitted love. He came to us from everywhere—into our living rooms on our television sets, gliding across stages, in malls, on T-shirts, and blasting joyfully out of passing cars. He seemed to be made of magic and he sprinkled it everywhere he went.
He danced and his moves entranced me. At five years old, I was glued to the television watching the “Thriller” video—scared and exhilarated, while Bozoma hid under the table. My sisters and I performed dance shows for our parents’ friends to the Bad album. I tried to learn the fight scene in “Beat It” to toughen up my nonviolent self—turns out, didn’t work. The only time I got into a fight as a child, I cried and asked the boy why he hit me. I wanted to understand him.
As I grew up, Michael Jackson came with me. I remember Ahoba yelling at me from the bottom of the stairs in 1992 to get off the phone because I was missing the beginning of the worldwide premiere of the “Remember the Time” video. I had to sneak to watch his “In the Closet” video—deemed too sexy by my conservative Christian parents—and snaked my head back and forth, imitating the dance moves from “Black or White.” When Bozoma went away to Wesleyan in 1999, I had the radio deejay dedicate “You Are Not Alone” to her, saddened about how lonely she must have been without us. Sometimes I wonder if my love of musicians originated with him.
The first time I heard abuse allegations against Michael Jackson, in 1993, I was fifteen years old. My first thought was, Well, this must be a mistake. Or a misunderstanding. He’s a celebrity. Or so I reasoned. These types of things happened all the time. I was in too deep, too blinded by my adoration, to consider the possibility. I don’t believe the thought that the allegations were true flitted across my mind for a second. When the case was settled, I shrugged with relief. Poor Michael, I thought. The media were so cruel to him.
It was only years later, when I watched him dangle his baby Blanket off a balcony above the waiting heads of paparazzi, that I felt an uneasy something sitting in my gut. As the allegations mounted, I grew more desperate for them not to be true. The ugliness was too much; the implications were too shattering. I stuck my head in the sand. I wanted to preserve my image of my idol. It was difficult to shed my defensive sense of Michael as a saint who needed my protection. No one had ever lived under that intense microscope in the history of humankind. He was globally famous in a way that was hard to comprehend. Long before Chiang Mai, Thailand, was a popular travel destination, I’d had a fruit vendor lick his finger and rub it on my skin to show me that if I showered more often, my skin color would come off. Like Michael Jackson, he added helpfully. (Surprising only him, my skin did not change color.)
Anyone would suffer under a spotlight that bright. And genius is usually linked with a touch of madness, right? Could he be anything other than perfect? It took me years to reckon with what these allegations may have meant, both to the idea I held of him in my heart and the families that were impacted.
The day Michael Jackson died, I was in my office at Legal Aid, working on an affidavit of support for a domestic violence restraining order for one of my clients. We had an appointment the next day for her to sign the documents and file them. My secretary, Veronica, rushed in my always-open office door.
She launched right in. “Did you hear?”
“Hear what?” I finished typing my sentence before fully turning my attention to her.
“They are saying that Michael Jackson has died.” She whispered it like a secret.
“Michael Jackson who?” I asked incredulously, trying to make sense of what she had just said. “Who’s saying that?”
She fiddled with her pearl necklace. “It’s all over TMZ.”
I scoffed. The source wasn’t credible to me and as such, neither was the news.
“We can’t trust them,” I said. “That’s not true. Farrah Fawcett already died today.” As though two celebrities couldn’t die the same day. I didn’t want to believe it, so I turned back to my computer. Sheepishly, Veronica left my office. I sat at my desk unable to work, trying to make sense of the possibility that my childhood idol could have died. He didn’t. He couldn’t. He was supposed to be immortal.
Slowly, it became real. As I spoke one by one with my family members and friends who had called to check up on me because they all knew of my love for him, they corroborated the impossible. Michael Joseph Jackson, the man whom I thought I would marry when I was eight years old, the man who created the soundtrack to my childhood and adolescence, the man I idolized for his expression and artistry, and the man I’d watched in horror as he fell publicly from grace, was, in fact, dead. The numbness of this inconceivable truth pinned me to my desk chair.
Suddenly, I needed to get out of the office. I needed to feel that joyous feeling of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” With a quick goodbye to Veronica and an affidavit of support left unfinished, I jumped into my Jeep in the parking lot. The sound system wasn’t great, but the speakers I’d upgraded the month before and the bass tube I put in the back helped. The auxiliary cable was already plugged into my hot-pink iPod Shuffle but the battery was dead. Out of frustration, I shook the iPod and noticed the butterfly sticker on the back. The melody for the song “Butterflies” popped in my head.
NOT MICHAEL JACKSON.
I rolled down the window and started the car, in a rush to get home. I needed to hear my favorite songs, although it would have been impossible to choose. All were my favorite and none were adequate for the gravity of that moment. Then, waiting for the stoplight to change in mid-city Los Angeles, I heard faint music. Someone was playing “Billie Jean” loudly from their parked car in front of the strip mall to my right. My heart surged. I kept driving. As the light changed and I drove west on Washington Boulevard toward my home, I saw people gathered in a post office parking lot on the corner of Washington and Crenshaw. Mixed melodies rang out. All Michael Jackson tunes. I slammed on the brakes and made a sharp left to join the crowd. I didn’t know what they were doing, but I wanted to be a part of it. Puzzlingly, grief longs both for solitude and community. Grief itself is a puzzle.
As I rolled through the parking lot, songs blared from car stereos. “Rock with You.” I wanted to own his sparkly jumpsuit in this video. “PYT”—somewhat of a theme song for me, as I tended to date people younger than me. “Man in the Mirror” regularly reminds me that all change starts within. People milled about. No one was going in or out of the post office and a few people in post office uniforms were among them. Seems they had simply found themselves there in a shared moment of grief and joined like I was doing. I parked my car in the first spot I could find. A man parked next to me sat with the driver side door of his car open and his head in his hands.
A reporter on his car radio was reporting from the hospital where Michael Jackson’s body had been taken. The man looked up as I approached. Shaking his head, he took off his baseball cap and revealed a small gray fade in need of a cut. All he said was “Michael Jackson, man.” He paused. “Michael Jackson.” His eyes were wet and bloodshot. The sight of this older Black man sitting in his green sedan crying about Michael Jackson’s death finally broke me.
“Same,” I responded through my own belated tears. “Same.” I wept, for the loss of my childhood idol, the loss of my innocence about our safety from death, and for anyone who survived molestation who was triggered by his glorification in the news.
Till the sun went down on the day Michael Jackson died, I stayed in that parking lot, dancing, singing, crying, and witnessing the shared grief of perfect strangers for a man whose legacy, for better and worse, was larger than a single life.
Some people leave complex legacies—meadows teeming with beautiful wildflowers and lethal toxins. We all do, in various ratios. And we truly have no idea how we or the landscape will transform in the ages to come. The Michael Jackson I loved is long since gone, but what he created remains and it is still alive within me. It will be with me until my death, and that I cannot deny. Why do we reduce people to the worst thing they’ve done? Or the best? When does someone stop being a father and become only an adulterer?
With people we love, we choose to remember them mostly in their magic. This is why some say that grief is the price we pay for love. But it is much more complicated than that. We freely grieve the things we love and will miss. It’s that way with all of us and I see it often in my work. I am still attached to Michael Jackson’s magic, despite all that happened afterward. While that creates complex layers to our grief, it does not lessen it. He was a whole human with stories, pains, and joys we will never know about that people who did know him well will intensely grieve. We cannot deny them that. I bet Andrew and John felt something similar about their racist father.
It is okay to mourn people in all their complexity, to honor their light, acknowledge their darkness, to accept the message in spite of the messenger. The very worst of us will still probably be missed by someone when they’re gone. Appreciated by someone. Loved by someone. Remembered fondly by someone for something. This is the full capacity of humanity at work.