Michael Jackson's Memorial

Tuesday, I viewed MJ’s memorial in my office on a computer—via the CNN website that offered streaming video side-by-side with scrolling Facebook comments from across the country and around the world.

The snippet comments added a weird dimension to an already weird phenomenon—the death of a weird mega-celebrity. (Weird was the chosen word of commentators who wanted to insinuate MJ’s real-life personality yet not deal with the unsavory allegations.)

We’ve seen live, media-event memorials on TV before: notably Princess’s Di’s and Ronald Reagan’s. But the website business took the evolving experience to a new place.

I’m a student of death practices and rituals. I’ve literally written the book for UU observances.

So, MJ’s public memorial riveted my attention. First, it became a funeral when the Jackson brothers—each wearing the same suit festooned with matching yellow tie and red lapel rose, with a signature sequined glove on the left hand—escorted the casket into the arena and positioned it in a bed of flowers at the foot of center stage. The coffin was gilded gold—custom fabricated by the Batesville Casket Company, Batesville IN. Some disputed that the body was really in the casket. The casket’s presence was enough to wring extra emotion from the performers.

Scant formal religion marked the moment. (Some said MJ before his death had been on a personal journey toward Islam.) Nevertheless, several speakers alluded to MJ going through Christ-like suffering—performing, if not dying, for our sins. The Maya Angelou poem, read by Queen Latifah, in particular, referenced Christ’s life with Michael’s.

On the CNN website, after an hour the Facebook posters began to ask, “Is this going to end?” The program lasted two hours, a bit long perhaps, but, for my sensibilities, it moved spiritedly from performer to performer. The spoken tributes were relatively brief and to the point.

In total, the memorial clearly belonged to the category of “black” funeral. A learned commentator Melissa Harris-Lacewell of Princeton, in a Tribune oped, identified the elements that resonated to the black experience in America:

“African-American death rituals have long been celebratory as well as mournful. As a marginal people whose collective identity is rooted in struggle, death is celebrated as a release from pain, inequality and torment. As a deeply religious people, death is celebrated as an opportunity for reunion with God. As a people who were often denied dignity in life, the dignity of a proper "home-going" is a critically important sign of respect. Along with these celebratory aspects of funerals, death rituals among African-Americans are marked by loud, deep displays of emotion and public grieving that mark the sense of loss experienced by the whole community.”

When all the performers had left the stage and the memorial seemed over, the Jackson family stood in the spotlight before a single microphone. At the literal end an eleven year old girl presented the perfect note of humanity. MJ’s daughter Paris, spoke through tears: “I just want to say ever since I was born, Daddy was the best father you can ever imagine. And I just want to say I love him so much.”

All things considered, the actual memorial service seemed relatively restrained and respectful, in keeping with the obvious desire to accentuate the positive and downplay the negative. The African American community embraced MJ’s blackness. The well-orchestrated extravaganza offered a window into the black experience/community.

How would I have framed a memorial service for MJ? I would have been compelled to offer a moral lesson or lessons. (The Unitarian way is heir to a Puritan tradition that admonishes the hearer to be forewarned, if only about the indelible preciousness of life.) In this regard a human life in death offers at least one lesson for survivors. MJ's life offers a quagmire of moral lessons. And they’re not all negative, though the weight is on the negative side of the scale.

In the end I’d affirm that a human life, however flawed, is sacred.

And I’d affirm Ellie’s refrain after we visited the Jackson Family’s Gary Home on Sunday: “He was just a kid, once.”