Meta-Grief and the Celebrity Mourner

I just don't believe that Michael would want me to share my grief with millions of others. How I feel is between us. Not a public event. — Dame Elizabeth Taylor to her 80,000 followers on Twitter, explaining why she turned down a request to speak at the Staples Center memorial.

I don't think there's a wrong way to express personal grief. I've seen my share of hospital waiting rooms and funeral homes, and people deal with things the best they can, whether they gnash their teeth or find distraction or simply withdraw.

The death of Michael Jackson is a huge media event, but it has also provided an outlet, and for many people a public outlet, for all the ways we grieve. Missing the music and lamenting its decline, missing the child-man and denouncing the man-child, remembering where you were when you first heard "Ben" or "Billie Jean"... Whatever you thought of him as a musician or a human being, his work and life is a nearly universal cultural reference, and everyone has an opinion about it - none more so than the celebrity griever.

I come here not to praise the common man but to bury the celebrity. Celebrity remembrances of Jackson or of any dead star can be as much a celebration of the person talking about it as of the deceased – often more so. When Kurt Cobain died in 1994, "Voice of a Generation" Douglas Coupland pulled off on the side of the road near Candlestick Park in San Francisco to figure out how he felt about it – and made sure to tell that to a major newspaper:

"I felt that I had never asked you to make me care about you," Coupland wrote. "But it happened – against the hype, against the odds – and now you are in my imagination forever. And I figure you're in heaven, too. But how, exactly, does it help you now, to know that you...were once adored?"

Article Author: Pat Padua

Pat Padua bridges high-brow and low-brow to form a distinctive American pan-browism. He hears the voices cry out from the Western Canon to Justin Timberlake, and, with an arsenal of optical tools ranging from disposable message cameras to the sharpest …

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