Tomorrow is the memorial service for Michael Jackson.

I must confess that I am no Michael Jackson fan, and perhaps never will be. Too outlandish and even bizarre for my personal taste, his surgically altered appearance and his loathing of his own skin color was, I thought, a betrayal of his own place in the music world—as somebody who in fact had shattered the race barrier.

It is now an understatement to say that he was a soul of great talent, a lunar figure whose likes will not moonwalk before our eyes in the years to come. And like it or not, his death has become a great social phenomenon that may find no parallel tomorrow.

Even the staid L’Osservatore Romano acknowledges the great emotion that has followed the news of his death, likening his cult to that of Elvis Presley, his sometime father in-law. Therein lies the uniqueness of his role in history, having united his name with that of Presley when he was briefly married to Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie, and with a death that evokes that of Presley himself who also died at an age that is not considered old in an era when life expectancy is no longer primitively young.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson has just died,” announced a woman just boarding a public bus in New York, calling out to her fellow passengers, all strangers to her surely, shortly after news of his death floated on the airwaves. The rest of the bus riders immediately reached for their cell phones. “La Roi de la Pop est mort,” blared the French media.

Starting young and dying young, this legendary fascination for Michael Jackson will outlive him, said the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper, echoing the rest of the world dazzled by his dance and his music. That, despite Western media’s penchant for unraveling the skeletons in the closet and the fodders of gossip as when he had to face charges of child molestation (he was eventually acquitted).

Death is a reality that must always put us in contemplation. And Michael Jackson’s is no exception. What should his death move us to? The answers are actually out-dazzled by the star that he was on stage. Show business is swathed in a veneer of lights and sounds that only provide a cruel illusion of what artists are in the privacy of their souls. Out of stage, Jackson was a tormented soul.

His obsession with the childhood that existed only in his reverie, epitomized by a Neverland that indeed only fantasy could weave, was at the core of that torment. Jackson had revealed once in an interview that the child prodigy that he was never had a normal childhood. The innocence of that childhood was overtaken by countless rehearsals for the Jackson 5, stage-managed by a domineering father who lusted for the returns of the growing popularity of his five sons.

The child prodigy was a victim of child abuse by that same father who did not spare physical punishment and who once had castigated him, saying his nose was ugly. Knowing that now, the surgical alteration of a face that later morphed into a look-alike of his bosom friend Diana Ross’ gives us a better perspective of Michael Jackson’s tortured existence. Compensating for the childhood that eluded him became a constant theme that he would weave into his fantasies.

“Jackson became an increasingly freakish figure,” one Western media opinion writer said, “a man-child weirdly out of touch with grown-up life. His skin became lighter, his nose narrower, and he spoke in a breathy, girlish voice. He surrounded himself with children at his Neverland ranch, often wore a germ mask while traveling and kept a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles as one of his closest companions.”

“It is as if he was defying gravity,” recalled a Hollywood publicist, “a man whose internal essence was at war with the norms of the world.”

Transcending childhood woundedness is easier said than done. It is a constant dilemma for many, for we all have our woundedness. But transcend it we must. And having done so, there lies our victory over the stings of life. For the opposite is the decline of the human being.

Shrieking fans who faint at the mere sight of Michael Jackson did not have these in mind. For he had become a god whose immortality we all thought will never be part of the script. And suddenly one day he does not wake up from his insomniac’s sleep. Google gets a fusillade of requests verifying the news. Memories of Kennedy’s assassination fill the mind. “It’s like when Kennedy was assassinated. I will always remember being in Times Square when Michael Jackson died,” says one grieving fan.

We remember the lyrics. “In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”

Stardom is a cruel illusion of the real humanity beneath the man. In death, let the real Michael Jackson outlive the monarch Michael Jackson that we have fantasized him to be. Let it prompt an outpouring of fervent prayers for his soul. Let the “mercy of Christ be his best chance to ‘never die,’ not his best-selling record.”

Le roi est mort. Vive le roi.

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Comments to monta@cu-cdo.edu.ph