Michael Jackson — the multi-talented performer who never really lived

While never a great fan of Michael Jackson, I always appreciated his talent.  Just to watch his music videos was to see a performer doing what he was born to do.  The flexibility of his movements, all in perfect sync with the music.

While we may have envied his talent and the success which he achieved, in large part because of that talent, we with smaller talents and much less material success, may well have found more happiness in our lives than did the late King of Pop.  Yes, Jackson enjoyed a level of success that none have since equaled and few could even imagine, but happiness seemed to elude him.

His childhood was without friends his own age, his adolescence spent entirely in the public eye and his adulthood lacking both privacy and sustaining human companionship.  Perhaps he regularly sought the company of children and teenagers to make up for the relationships missing from his own youth.  He never did seem to have any close friends, missing, in his abbreviated life, the kind of human contact which makes life meaningful to all of us.

And he never seemed comfortable in his own skin.  As the AP put it in their piece on his passing, “As years went by, he became an increasingly freakish figure. His skin became lighter and his nose narrower.” ^[1]

His success thus apparently came at a terrible cost.  Perhaps the most gifted musical performer of all time, he never really seemed at home in this world.  And I, never a great fan of his, find myself strangely moved by his passing, as if mourning for a bright-eyed child, stricken with cancer at a very young age and dying before he had the chance to live.

Because it seems that while Michael Jackson brought so much joy to so many through his gifts, he never found that joy himself.  He seemed to have missed out on living.

Today, as we mourn his passing, we remember his talents and the price he paid for his success.  May we find what he lacked.  And he find the peace that eluded him in this world.