Hello, bloggers.

Before I went on my whirlwind trip to Spain and England, I was riveted by the coverage of the Michael Jackson funeral service.  I watched at least 7 hours of the TV coverage with my wife, Rose.

There were many wonderful and moving divisions as it unfolded.

As you may or may not know, in my first life, before I became an artist, I was a funeral director—so I have a lot of experience in the expression of a person’s life after their death through service.  I watched the Michael Jackson service, therefore, not only as a fan, but also as a person who for many years spent almost every waking moment engrossed in how people memorialize their loved ones after death.  I could find no fault in the whole range of emotions and divisions of togetherness in that event.

Brooke Shields, I thought, brought a “real person” forward with her anecdotes of Michael Jackson.  I don’t always agree with Al Sharpton, but his comments were also right on; he did Jackson and himself proud with his very impressive dissertation.  The members of Congress who spoke were quite sterling in their remarks.

Then, with the final cry of anguish from his daughter at the very end, it was almost like a punch in the stomach.  I don’t know how anyone could sit through that without being touched.

It seemed to me that all the emotions of the human spirit were brought forward in a dignified and organized manner through the people, the music, the song, the photography, and the other elements.  Whoever put that service together really knew what they were doing.

The other thing that really got to me was that in Michael Jackson you had a young little black boy from outside Chicago, and by the time he was age 50 he was one of the most powerful people in the world, with a reported 1-billion people watching his funeral.

I even saw differences in the demeanor of the pundits, who are of course very skeptical of everything.  At the beginning of the service, they were bordering on flippance, but at the end they had changed to reverence.

If we look in total at people’s lives, we can come together and really celebrate and make up our own minds as to whether a given person helped this planet go forward.  I think from what I saw, that in Michael Jackson’s case, there’s no doubt.  He brought peace, understanding, and a different way of looking at life, and it was manifested magnificently through his final tribute.

I thought that the soliloquy by his brother was right on in terms of the emotion and love it articulated on behalf of the whole family.

There was also a prayer that we used to invoke in the funeral service, and it expressed that when, through one man, a little more hope and kindness comes into the world, then that man’s life had meaning.  I think that’s really the test, and I believe that Michael Jackson passed that test with flying colors.

May he rest in peace—he had very little of it in this life and deserves it in the next.

Matt