My initial reaction to all the hoopla surrounding the Michael Jackson memorial (and it is hoopla) is to make every effort to not care. The man was a pop star. And incredibly influential one, to be sure. But he wasn’t a close personal friend of mine.
And considering that I’m working through the death of a close personal friend of mine last winter, it’s hard for me to look at everthing and not see it as shallow.
That being said, as parents, we have to explain to our children what’s going on in a way that they can understand. I mean, how do you explain to a 10-year-old what Jackson’s death means to you, especially if you were not a particularly big fan. Or even if you were.
We need to put this into perspective and while it is more than tempting to condemn the superficiality of celebrity worship, there is something to the public grief over Jackson’s death.
The English poet John Donne wrote a brief meditation in the early 17th century, which was insanely popular in the early 1970s because the connectedness of humanity was big then:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
And it certainly applies here. By the way, the never send to know for whom the bell tolls part? Back in Donne’s day, it was traditional to toll the local church bell slowly when someone in the parish died. So you’d hear the bell and immediately ask, “Gee, who croaked?” Donne’s point, of course, being that it doesn’t matter who croaked. We are all diminished by the passing of a fellow human being.
And I suspect that in mourning the passing of Michael Jackson, we are all mourning some little bit of ourselves. Whether any or all of Jackson’s work will survive as long as Donne’s has, who knows? It’s not really relevant. Jackson, whether you were a fan or not, represents us, ultimately. And how we think about death is part of that.
So while I, personally, offer prayers for the family and friends, admire Liz Taylor’s statement about not going to the memorial service (which I saw on the news last night and haven’t verified) and giggle because she reportedly tweeted it (how totally cool), I’m also profoundly glad I didn’t have to go anywhere near the Staples Center this morning and plan to avoid any more media hoopla. And, yes, I appreciate that I am, at this moment, adding to it.
But ultimately, I will try to use this event as a reminder that I am not an island, that I hold a stake in the lives of others and I am part of that inter-connectedness that we all have to each other.
I don’t know if that helps explain things to your kids, but there it is.
Anne Louise Bannon
Your Family Viewer
