What does it mean to lose Michael Jackson?

I feel left out of the cultural moment. I am not shocked, or even much saddened by Michael Jackson's death. When I first got the text message my brain immediately weighed it against Mark Sandman's death, the tenth anniversary of which looms. Sandman's death was a shock. Still, it isn't the lack of surprise that keeps me from joining the keening, but the sense that the grieving is long done.

His story is tragic, I fear in the classic sense. The comparison in Salon.com to Presley's death seems apt not only because of their mutual belabored suicides, but the lives. In both one senses the lack of a core, of a person under the persona. There had to have been, once, yes? It feels as though somehow it was erased, or trampled. Seems, feels, all these qualifiers because I don't know. I never knew him, never met him, never saw him in concert. Quincy Jones said, "I've lost my little brother today and part of my soul has gone with him." He believed there was a person in there. I can't help it, though; I wonder when Jones lost him. We can love someone long after they have stopped being the person we came to love. Ask anyone with a family member suffering from Alzheimer's.

Not only didn't I know Michael Jackson, I was never a big fan. I was more moved when Joe Strummer died, not personally, but because I thought he still had much to offer popular music. I don't feel that way about Jackson. Was that why I wasn't with my generation, the way I was when Jim Henson died (he also shared the day of his death with a famous person, Sammy Davis, Jr. I wasn't meant to feel his loss deeply because he was my parents generation, but I loved Sammy Davis Jr., his Candy Man days.)

A new wave girl and then a part-time punk long before Belle and Sebastian thought of the term, Michael Jackson was inescapably my childhood through young adult years. He was not on my turntable, not in my mix tapes, is not on my ipod. But he was there.

I learned "ABC,” "Ben" and "I'll Be There" by singing along with my big sister. They were among the songs we could pick up on the candy colored transistor radios we brought to the beach, and out into our back yards in the summer. Lisa's long blonde hair loose on her back making me jealous. Her fringed bangs made her look like a TV star. I see her, see her shoulders getting pink from the sun when I so much as think of one those songs. Then there were the solo career songs “Thriller,” “Billie Jean” and “Don’t Stop 'Til You Get Enough,” the last of whose lyrics I never could understand. I didn’t try hard. I was busy trying to decipher Mick Jones’ accent and Elvis Costello's sense of humor.

The latter day Michael Jackson songs were played at our teenage drinking parties, then they disappeared from my world. My friends and I listened to REM, The The and U2, Industry and the Jesus and Mary Chain. For diversity’s sake we threw in some Beastie Boys, Grand Master Flash and Frank Sinatra. Then Jackson resurfaced, at work functions and weddings when the DJ was desperate to get people to dance, especially if the crowd looked that certain age. My age.


I feel something at his passing. I feel a sigh; not of relief, but simply that sigh that comes when you exhale a breath you forgot you were holding, holding under all those other breaths. What happened to him? I don't know. How much happiness did he have? I don't know. But I can breathe now. It hurt me to watch him mutilate himself. It hurt to think about him.

A friend was telling me about running into Quincy Jones at an airport in Europe. It was a cool story. She leading an educational tour in France. After her exchange the students, and worse, the teachers asked "who was that?"
Quincy Jones, she said, but they didn't recognize the name.
The famous music producer, she said.
Huh? They responded. What did he produce a teacher asked?
My friend was stunned and one other young woman came to her rescue with “Thriller.”
She told me this story this past Friday. I felt myself pull away at the mere word Thriller. It did not conjure for me the song, or the album or groundbreaking video. To mind came instead the awful, terrifying life of the man in these last decades.

I sigh. I don't have to look away. His death is sad, but it was a long, agonizing death and whatever goodbyes I had to say, I have already said.