Michael Jackson Memorial Watched at Pigeon Park

I walked by Pigeon Park this morning and there was a cluster of people sitting on park benches in the drizzle watching Michael Jackson's memorial. They were watching it on a television parked on the sidewalk in front of the second hand store.

I stopped and the words, "I Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer" appeared on a red strip across the bottom of the screen. A native guy standing up close to the tv set turned to me and said, "That's Stevie Wonder singing."

A woman stopped and stood watching. Tears streamed down her face.

As I walked up Hastings St afterwards, I was thinking of Michael Jackson and the presumption of innocence. The enormous resources of the state of California were used in an attempt to convict him of child sexual abuse and he was found not guilty. I don't know what the evidence against him was. When I watched more of the Memorial later on the internet, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee was on stage saying that she was following the American way, which is to consider somebody "innocent until proven otherwise".

I didn't like the way Jackson got mixed up with the Nation of Islam though. They're anti-semitic. The bio-mom of Jackson's two oldest children reportedly disapproved of their influence; she's Jewish. Stuart Backerman in Vancouver, who moved to Neverland for three years to be Jackson's publicist, said in a local interview that he left when the Nation of Islam started taking over Jackson's affairs as he didn't agree with their views. In another interview, he said he got "pushed out" by them. But he still "loves" Jackson and prizes the black signature hat Jackson gave him as a gift.

Overall, I find the media hype around Jackson's death and the endless parade of sordid details less captivating than his dancing. (Although I was momentarily captivated by the sight of his two older children with hair obviously died darker for his Memorial, making them match up better with the Jackson family.) I've been largely ignoring the television coverage but I still watch the video of his Bad Tour Live in Japan.

The Body's Old-Fashioned Need to Cry

I was listening to CBC yesterday and a reporter was summarizing Saturday's memorial for Wendy Ladner-Beaudry at UBC.  He said the message was "Don't mourn her loss", celebrate her life and cherish those you love in your life.  

This is a fashionable approach to death, but I'm suspicious of it.  I don't have a problem with celebrating the life of a person who has died, but at times it seems like an attempt to do an end run around mourning.  The attitude seems to be -- I'm not talking specifically about Ladner-Beaudry's family here -- that mourning is a downer so focus instead on the positive of the deceased person's life and get on with yours.   But there is no substitute for deep mourning.  

Sometimes there is nothing to do but cry. 

Tears not cried don't conveniently evaporate; I can name more than a few therapists who would agree that they simply get repressed. I read a therapist's account of a depressed man who entered therapy as an adult.  When asked about his mother dying when he was a child, the depressed man said that it hadn't affected him all that much, that he hadn't cried.  So the therapist walked him through the actual moments in which as a young boy he was told that his mother had died.  He saw himself looking down at his little shoes and he saw big tears splashing onto them.  For a moment as a child he had done what the body does naturally, cry profound tears.  But he had soon forgotten that he had done that; he had too soon repressed his need to cry and had gotten on with life. 

When therapist Theresa Shepperd-Alexander's mother died, she didn't look for short cuts.  She later wrote that she had grieved long and deep.   Despite her thorough grieving though, a remnant of her grief caught up with her years later when she was an out-patient at a hospital. Something a nurse said, the way she said it, triggered Shepperd-Alexander's grief about her mother and her eyes filled with tears.  Grief left unfelt continues to try to be expressed.

It seemed a tad air-headed of a Province reporter this weekend to write that people had gathered at Ladner-Beaudry's memorial "to remember not what they lost but what they had". This modern celebratory approach to an ended life may work fine for an hour-long memorial, but it can never outsmart the body's physiological need to grieve long and grieve deep.  Jenna Beaudry said at the memorial that her mother "reminded me every single day that she loved me."  Her mother will never again be around to tell her that. Sometimes there is nothing to do but cry.