Michael Jackson Is Not Dead: Grief, Legacy, Purpose, and the Movie That Brought Him Back to Me
#RilfromRowK • Movie Review
On learning the power of autonomy, reclaiming the parts of yourself you left behind, and discovering what it actually takes to choose a life of your own. . . . .
Disclaimers: SPOILERS AHEAD! Proceed with caution! This space is built on honest opinions and personal reflections, where everything here is expressed through my own viewing experience. Five viewings gave me a lot more than a movie review, and somewhere between April and August, Michael became tangled up with my childhood, purpose, grief, music, memory, and the life I’m still figuring out. If I mention something you haven’t seen yet, consider this your warning. And friends, this is a long, but good one! 🎬🍿
Writing Playlists: 🎬✍🏾✨
Mostly Michael, obviously. I mean duh! This only makes sense right?! 😂 These are my most-listened-to MJ songs in order, with a couple other albums that were stuck on repeat during the writing process. If you want to have a good time, press play on my custom-curated “The King of Pop" playlist and enjoy while you read.
It Is Not a Movie. It Is an Event.
Some movies are simply movies. You buy the ticket, sit down, enjoy yourself for a few hours, and eventually move on to whatever comes next.
Then there are movies that become timestamps in your life.
Jaafar Jackson in Michael Movie Poster (April 2026) Photo Source IMDB
I first saw Michael for an early screening event on Wednesday, April 22nd. I was back in the theater on April 30th. Then May 6th. Then May 12th. By the time I returned for my fifth viewing on June 25th—the seventeenth anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death—I already knew this experience had become something much bigger than me liking a movie. People were coming out in droves—toddlers, kids, teenagers, adults, and people old enough to have watched Michael grow up in real time. They came dressed as different eras of him, in fedoras and sequins, military jackets and single gloves, filling theaters with the kind of excitement that made me wonder what it might have felt like if Michael were still here and all of us were lining up to see him perform.
I knew where the story was going. I knew which performances were coming. After enough viewings, I even knew which moments would make the entire theater react together. I especially knew which scene transitions would make me grip the arm of the chair harder, and which scenes would make my eyes fill before they had even fully begun. Still, every time the lights went down, the film found a different part of me.
The first time, I was watching Michael. By my fifth time, I was watching my childhood, my grief, my ambition, my fear, my faith, and the version of myself I am still trying to become all being tested.
Because MICHAEL is not just a movie.
It is an event.
And at the same time for me, it became a reckoning.
The Ril Talk: Grief Is a Sneaky Son of a Gun
I do not remember exactly what I felt on June 25, 2009, the day we lost him.
I remember pieces of the news. I remember the disbelief—my own and that of the people around me. It was truly a sad day. I remember watching Michael Jackson’s memorial service on television, and I am almost certain that I cried. But I was fifteen years old. I understood that Michael was gone, but I did not yet have the emotional language or life experience to fully understand what his death meant to me.
Just six months earlier, on January 10th, I had experienced my first major loss when my Granny—my first best friend and, in so many ways, another mother to me—passed away. I don’t think I ever fully processed losing her either—or at least, I didn’t think I had. But mourning Michael this summer has brought me back to so much of my childhood, and so much of that childhood included her. Maybe, in grieving him, I’ve been finding my way through some of that grief for her, too.
At 15, grief was a deep ache.
At 32, grief has been an excavation.
Watching Michael as an adult forced me to return to feelings I had never properly processed. I was lamenting the loss of a man I had never met, but I was also mourning the little girl who knew his music before she knew how important those memories would eventually become.
Michael Jackson was my Michael Jackson.
That sentence sounds almost silly because he belonged to the entire world, but every generation has artists whose work becomes inseparable from their memories. Before I was old enough to understand charts, sales, cultural impact, or the mechanics of fame, I knew his voice. I knew his ad-libs—the “hee-hee,” the “shamone,” his grunts, his howls, his snaps, the layers of his background vocals, and even the tiny sounds that live beneath the production when you listen closely enough.
I remember having his pictures on my binders and as my computer wallpapers. I remember his different eras, the clothes, the hair, his performances, and the feeling that each album introduced a new version of him while still sounding unmistakably Michael.
Going back even further, to when I was just a kid, I remember going to my Granny’s house near Clark Atlanta and Morris Brown in West End, Atlanta. The clearest music memories I have from that house are Lee Williams & the Spiritual QCs’ “Cooling Water,” Donnie McClurkin’s “We Fall Down,” and Michael Jackson. There were certainly other songs and other artists, but those are the sounds my mind held onto.
April with her Great Granny (collage) 💞🕊️
That is the strange thing about memory. You do not get to choose what stays vivid and what slowly disappears. As the years go on, unless I see pictures of her, she herself is fading, but I am so glad I have the memories I do have.
While writing this, I began thinking about my first Michael Jackson cassette tape she gave me, the CD book I can’t remember the last time I saw, and the childhood belongings that disappeared before I was ready to let them go. I thought about my Barbie dolls and the elaborate world I created for them inside the built-in bookshelf in our den. They had bedrooms, closets, kitchens, children, and whole lives inside that shelf. I even used the bottom shelf as their lower level parking garage. I kept them up with great care, even as I became older and played with them less.
Then one day, they were gone.
Given away without my permission and without a proper goodbye.
For years, I thought I had moved past it because they were only toys, but there is something uniquely painful about realizing you were never given the opportunity to decide what happened to the objects that carried your imagination. I never got my Toy Story 3 moment. I never got to lovingly place those dolls into the hands of another child and know they were going somewhere safe.
Sometimes I still wonder where my toys are. Are they somewhere thinking of me? Did they go on an enormous journey and eventually find a window where they could look in and see that I grew up? Obviously, this is real life, and I would absolutely lose my mind if those toys suddenly came alive, but I had a huge imagination as a child, and some part of that little girl is still trying to give her things a happy ending.
That may seem like a long road back to telling you about the movie Michael, but grief rarely travels in a straight line. One memory opens another. One song brings back a room. One performance reminds you of a person. One movie causes you to realize that you are not only grieving who is gone, but that you are grieving who you were when they were still here.
I have spent so much of adulthood focused on surviving the day in front of me that I rarely get to make time to remember what it felt like to be a child. My childhood was not perfect. There were things missing from it and things I am still learning how to name.
But Michael’s music was there.
This film brought that music back to my life, and in doing so, it brought pieces of me back with it.
The Man With the Prettiest Smile and the Killer Dance Moves
Let me start off by saying that only a Jackson could have played this Jackson!
There are moments throughout Michael when Jaafar Jackson does not merely resemble his uncle Michael Jackson; instead, he seems to completely dissolve into him.
The resemblance becomes more striking as the film progresses, but it is not just the face, the hair, the costumes, or the body movements. You see it in the anxious fidgeting and the politeness, in the shyness that exists alongside the bravery it takes to ask for what he wants, and in the way he seems to shrink inward when he is uncomfortable before completely transforming when it is time to hop on that stage.
There is a moment during the making of “Thriller” when the camera begins moving away from him, and I swear the resemblance is so strong it is almost unsettling. Then there are scenes such as the tense conversations surrounding the family tour, the drive through the Hollywood Hills before speaking with his longtime bodyguard William “Bill” Bray, and the creation of “Beat It,” where you begin to understand that embodying Michael required far more than learning choreography.
Now speaking of choreography, Michael’s dancing is its own language. You can recognize his silhouette, a single pose, the snap of a leg, the tilt of a hat, that impossible lean, or the beginning of a moonwalk and know exactly who you are looking at before you ever see his face. Those movements have survived generations because they are not simply famous dance steps anymore; they are his signatures. His movement has become so deeply embedded in popular culture that sometimes all it takes is one gesture for an entire room to understand the reference. Professional dancers study them. Children imitate them. Crowds still lose their minds the second somebody hits one move correctly.
Which makes what Jaafar accomplished physically even more impressive. He wasn't simply learning choreography; he was training his body to move with the precision, musicality, control, sharpness, and instinct people immediately associate with Michael Jackson. There is nowhere to hide when you're recreating movement that millions of people already know well enough to recognize when something is even slightly off. I can only imagine the hours of training, repetition, conditioning, studying, and attention to the smallest details it took to reach the point where Jaafar could stop looking like someone performing Michael's choreo and begin looking like Michael himself performing it.
Furthermore, Jaafar had to ultimately inhabit contradictions.
Michael could be shy and commanding. Gentle and relentless. Anxious and completely certain. He could appear uncomfortable inside a business meeting and then become the most powerful person in the room once he began explaining his vision. For someone whose image became larger than life, there was something powerful about watching Jaafar’s performance continually bring him back to human size.
People can debate performances, campaign seasons, and award politics until they are blue in the face. I know what I saw. Jaafar Jackson took on the nearly impossible assignment of portraying one of the most recognizable human beings to ever live, and he did not turn him into an impersonation. He gave us a person. I do not care what anybody says. That man deserves his Oscar nomination, and I will be seated to see whether the Academy gives him what he earned—even though watching the Oscars live for the first time this year had me wanting to scratch my skin off.
Michael Movie Premiere April 2026 (Video Source @michaelmovie Instagram)
The casting throughout the film is phenomenal. What moved me most about everyone’s performances wasn’t simply how closely they could recreate people we already knew, but how naturally they seemed to settle into them. Juliano Krue Valdi, who portrays Michael during the Jackson 5 years, had me in tears almost instantly. The moment he began singing “ABC” and “Who’s Lovin’ You,” I was done. Those songs have always been impressive, but watching Juliano embody the voice, the pressure, the talent, and the beginnings of that enormous destiny made me want to hear young Michael all over again. I went back to those early records, including Got to Be There—the same album from my first Michael Jackson cassette tape—and heard that little boy’s voice differently than I had when I first discovered him all those years ago. Nia Long, portraying Michael’s mother, Katherine Jackson, carries so much emotional weight, particularly in the hospital scene, without becoming theatrical or overplayed. There is something especially heavy about watching a mother finally apologize for pain that has been allowed to sit between her and her child for years—the kind of pain that does not disappear simply because no one has spoken about it. Colman Domingo as Joe Jackson and Deon Cole as Don King are equally convincing. The scene they share is one of several moments when the actors feel so deeply embedded in this world that you momentarily forget you are watching an entire dramatization.
And apparently, seeing Michael again on the screen was not enough for me. Watching Jaafar throughout the press run has been a little uncanny at times; after spending so long studying and embodying his uncle, there are moments—especially when he smiles—when the resemblance feels stronger than genetics alone can explain. Then there was Michael himself, with that killer smile that could light up a room. Since the film’s release, my social media feeds have transformed into what can only be described as Michael Jackson’s internet. It's no longer Beyoncé’s internet, lol.
My social media feeds are still filled with archival footage, interviews, rehearsals, home videos, rare clips, and performances, allowing me to rewatch Michael grow from that adorable little boy with the enormous voice into the ridiculously handsome man he became. The internet of my childhood simply wasn’t this expansive; so much of this footage once had to find you, and now there always seems to be another piece of Michael waiting to be discovered with much easier access. Months later, other major movies have premiered, other press tours have come and gone. Even Spider-Man and The Odyssey have had their moments on my timeline, but my algorithm still refuses to leave Michael Jackson alone. I’m perfectly fine with that.
Can you tell my favorite era? 🤭 At some point over the summer, these have all been a part of my wallpaper on my phone. Just enjoy yourself ladies!!!! Photo credits: the many corners of the internet I wandered into during my Michael Jackson summer. Original sources unknown.
I mean, look at this man!!!!!! 😍
Hearing Everything Again for the First Time
I have listened to Michael’s music throughout my entire life, but I had not listened to him like this in years. After the film, I became completely consumed. I would attempt to listen to something else, and before long, I would return to him. During a recent makeup appointment with a client I had not seen in several years, I asked if she minded if I played his music because I was still deep inside what the internet had lovingly started calling “Michael psychosis”. She agreed, so I turned on my “The King of Pop” playlist, which I curated from the songs that had followed me through childhood, my teenage years, and adulthood, intentionally sequenced to take you through them the way I wanted them experienced.
Song after song, hit after hit, era after era, we knew exactly what we were hearing.
She pointed out how incredible it was to hear that many instantly recognizable songs back-to-back, and she was right. Michael did not simply release music; he created entire worlds. You can hear the difference between the child, the teenager, the young man finding independence, and the adult artist fully in command of his creative identity. Each era has its own visual language, emotional texture, and sonic atmosphere, yet through every transformation, there is no mistaking him for anyone else.
Every word feels so intentional, making his lyrics timeless. Every drum, horn, ad-lib or vocal layer, snap, bell, whistle, breath, and background sound exists for a reason. His music is not casually assembled. It is architecture.
Listening again with different speakers and headphones made songs I had known for decades feel brand new. I even learned online that some of the recordings themselves have changed across different releases and remasters, with fans pointing out differences between versions on vinyl and the ones available through streaming today. In the car, I hear the bass and the fullness of the arrangements. With noise-canceling headphones, I hear more of the background vocals, subtle melodies, and pieces of instrumentation that I had heard before but never really noticed on their own. Listening through a regular Bluetooth speaker sometimes brought his vocal runs forward in a completely new way.
When I revisited the Bad album in full (definite top three of his albums for me), I became emotional. Then I returned to Got to Be There. Can somebody please tell me why was that child singing his heart out like that? To hear young Michael possess such a raw emotional instinct was special! His voice would continue to deepen, sharpen, stretch, and transform as he grew, but that undeniable gift was already there. That is one of the most beautiful and painful parts of his story, though. We witnessed him grow in public. We can hear his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood through the music. We can trace the evolution of a human being through records, performances, and visual eras. His music transcends time because he created it with more than technical skill. He put life inside it.
Now whenever I hit play on this playlist, my mood resets. That is how I know, deep in my spirit, that Michael’s music is healing, especially for me.
Apple Music Replay: April-June 2026
Michael absolutely took over my summer of 2026. By May, he was my #1 artist with 4,334 minutes listened, Bad was my #1 album, and The Jacksons were right behind him at #2. In June, Michael was still sitting at #1. And here’s proof that I did try to listen to other people. 😂
When Life Outside the Theater Gets Louder
While Michael was becoming one of the brightest parts of my year, life outside the theater was becoming increasingly difficult. I want to be careful here because my mother's medical information belongs to her, our relationship belongs to us, and I never want someone else's diagnosis to become content simply because it affected me too. What I can say is that during this season, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. The news arrived while I was already trying to repair my relationship with my own body, work, finances, and self.
At the same time, people close to me were experiencing major losses of their own. Within one week, two friends lost parents. I had just returned from seeing Moana with my best friend when we learned that one friend's father had passed. Days later, I was sitting with my childhood best friend, holding my new daughter—very much my niece 😂—as she slept peacefully in my arms. It was one of the softest moments I had experienced in a very long time. Then another message came. Another super close friend’s mother had been hospitalized, and soon after, she passed away.
That is what life has felt like majority of 2026: joy with an interruption. Peace with a notification. A soft moment that barely had time to settle before something else demanded emotional space.
I am not good with death. I never feel as though I know exactly what to say, and during that season I found myself asking God repeatedly to help me show up for people in the ways they actually needed—not simply in the ways I knew how. I also started recognizing how much pain can make you want to protect yourself by becoming harder. But I don't want survival to cost me my tenderness. I don't want disappointment, grief, or the darkness of the world to convince me that softness is foolish.
I think that's part of why I kept returning to Michael. For a few hours, the theater gave me somewhere to put everything I didn't know what to do with yet. I could sit in the dark and let the music carry me. I could cry about Michael without needing to explain that some of those tears belonged to my childhood, my family, my fears, my friends, and the growing realization that adulthood rarely gives you enough time to process one painful thing before introducing another. I knew how the movie ended, but I still wanted to experience the journey again. The movie didn't make life outside the theater disappear; it simply gave me somewhere to breathe before I had to step back into it.
🎬🍿Five Watches: Apr 22 · Apr 30 · May 6 · May 12 · Jun 25
“You Can See It. You Can Do It.”
Now let’s pick things back up. There is a moment in Michael when he is speaking with his newly hired attorney, John Branca, laying out exactly what he sees for his future: the biggest-selling album of all time, stadiums filled with thousands of people around the world, and short films that would turn his music into something audiences could see as well as hear. The vision is enormous, but Michael speaks about it as though he can already see it clearly. “You can see it. You can do it,” he tells Branca.
This is me to me having this conversation for my own dreams and goals. I have been working on the next evolution of my career for a while now, and lately I’ve been watching two very different parts of it officially take shape.
Not long ago, I watched a young woman online talk about how, if you're not moving quickly enough, you're getting left behind—leaving money on the table, wasting time, maybe even being lazy. If I’m being honest, different parts of me had different reactions to that. Part of me felt offended, part of me wondered if that offense was my ego recognizing somewhere I had been getting in my own way, and another part of me thought: life is simply not that one-dimensional. We live in a world that seems determined to make everything move faster, but I know for a fact the richest parts of being alive have nothing to do with money or how quickly we can produce. They come from slowing down enough to actually experience what life is offering us, whether the season is extremely beautiful, just ordinary, or downright terrible. People on the internet can speak with incredible certainty about lives they aren't living. Fear and procrastination are real, but so are depression, family circumstances, grief, illness, financial instability, changing confidence, and seasons when simply keeping yourself together requires energy nobody else can see or provide.
The internet rarely gives us a complete picture of any of it. Most of the time, we're scrolling through one another's best moments, while vulnerability can disappear underneath the next amazing thing on our screens. When I finally shared that my mom had been diagnosed with lung cancer—and that we needed help after struggling privately for much longer than most people knew—I was almost stunned by how many people already within my reach had been touched by cancer, serious illness, or suddenly had to become caretakers themselves. Sometimes it takes somebody being transparent for us to realize how many people are actually standing in the same fog with us. I've had to learn to discern the difference in my own life—to be accountable for the places where I'm holding myself back without automatically treating every slower season as evidence that I'm failing.
I have been building the next era of my bridal business for more than two years. I think about it when I wake up and when I go to sleep at night. I can imagine the experience with so much detail that I can almost walk through it before any of it physically exists. I know what I want my offers and experiences to feel like. I know the kind of connection I want future brides to recognize immediately and feel drawn to become a part of. I know the standard I am willing to create and provide, and I hope that, in doing so, I can contribute to a meaningful shift within this industry as a Black Luxury Makeup Artist. But believing in an idea and releasing it are not the same thing.
Michael Jackson Liberian Girl Video 1989
During these same two years, another part of my career started asking for more room. I’ve always known that makeup would not be the only thing I did. That instinct goes back much further than my career in beauty. I originally entered college at Clayton State University as an English major, but in 2012, before I had much confidence—or rather the necessary support—to make that decision completely for myself, I was warned that choosing writing or another creative path meant choosing the life of a starving artist. Well...all these years later, I chose the “practical” degree and somehow still found my way into seasons of the starving-artist neighborhood anyway. 😂
As you can see, I found my way back to everything creative. I had written for my high-school magazine since freshman year and imagined attending a college where I could explore art, photography, and writing. Clayton State didn't necessarily have the expansive creative environment I pictured at the time, but I found my own color within it. I took pictures anyway. I drew anyway. I modeled anyway. I found makeup anyway. Looking back, I've spent much of the last decade finding my way back to creating, even when the voices around me encouraged me away from it. Eventually, something clicked and decision-making became clearer when I stopped giving everyone else's expectations equal volume to my own voice. Michael made me truly understand that freedom was never something somebody else had to give me. It was something I had to claim for myself.
What I didn't know was just how fulfilling returning to writing would become. The more I wrote, the more I realized that this wasn't simply something I enjoyed doing on the side. Writing has challenged me, excited me, given me somewhere to put the things I notice and feel, and brought a kind of enrichment to my life that I didn't know I was missing. After spending nearly a decade building a career in one industry, there is something deeply uncomfortable about giving yourself permission to imagine another path alongside it.
I also know now that what we're capable of isn't always easy to recognize when we don't have the environment, support, or community to help us see it. We are human; we were never really designed to figure everything out in isolation, and sometimes doing it alone means staying stuck somewhere much longer than we were ever meant to. From the outside, that can look like someone isn't moving quickly enough when, in reality, they may be trying to find their way without the resources, reassurance, or connection that might have helped them move sooner. That's the frustrating and beautiful thing about risk: there are questions you simply cannot answer from the safety of where you already are. You don't know whether another path will expand your life, disappoint you, redirect you, or reveal something about yourself you couldn't have known without taking it.
From what Michael portrays—and from years of interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and stories about his work—Michael had people around him who pushed, challenged, encouraged, and, at times, undoubtedly influenced him in directions both good and bad. But even with his shyness or discomfort, he learned to make his voice heard when something mattered to him. My version of that has looked different: I have had to teach myself, through every changing season of my life, how to make my own voice louder—to ask for room to be made for me and, when it isn't, understand that I will have to make room for myself anyway.
Bridal is still very much a part of what I'm building. I haven't abandoned it, but if I'm being truthful, there have been seasons—especially recently—when I simply haven't been emotionally available to give that part of my business what I know it deserves. My mother's illness changed where a lot of my energy needed to go. I couldn't manufacture emotional capacity I didn't have just because my business had plans. Now, though, it feels a little like the clouds are thinning. I can see some blue sky again, and perhaps a little love in the air. Instead of allowing this season to convince me that I haven't been moving at all, I started paying attention to what was already moving—and what is ready to move now.
Because at some point, seeing it has to become doing it. That is The Velvet Row™.
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For once, I let the next thing that was ready actually be next. I stopped treating progress like it only counted if it happened in the order I originally planned. The bridal vision could still be mine without being the thing I forced myself to release first, and while I continue carrying that vision, I gave another one permission to become real.
Preparation isn't always procrastination. Revisiting something doesn't automatically mean I'm afraid to release it, and wanting something badly doesn't mean I have to force it into existence on my preferred timeline. Part of knowing myself—and trusting God with where I'm going—is recognizing what I actually have the bandwidth to carry, staying aligned with the path I'm on, and being obedient enough not to create unnecessary delays of my own. I would rather build with enough intention that when the right opportunity meets me, I have the structure to hold it than rush simply to prove that I'm moving.
I can see these things so clearly! I can spend years building them in my head, refining and protecting them until they resemble what I always imagined. Maybe readiness isn't about knowing exactly when to move, but doing the work faithfully enough to recognize the moment when it arrives—and being prepared to carry what comes with it.
Michael’s confidence was not always loud. Sometimes it was a calm declaration of what would happen next; other times, it was recognizing that an idea needed movement now, before he had time to question himself out of it. Watching Michael work on “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” in the early morning, only to catch a news report about gang violence and immediately begin shaping what would become “Beat It,” reminded me that preparation and immediacy aren't opposites. Some ideas need time to develop or to be put on pause, while others arrive asking something of you right then. Michael knew the difference—and moved.
Like Michael, I understand that my talent is not mine to keep. God-given talent is not a private collection. It is not meant to sit untouched until we finally feel worthy enough to reveal it. In order to be our most impactful, we must create with our talents using great intention and with the best interest of those who will come across our work. Our talents are supposed to be sharpened, nurtured, honored—and then given away through our work, with the recognition that we've been entrusted with something valuable and the responsibility to use it well.
“This Is My Path. Mine.”
There is another moment in Michael that stayed with me for a different reason. After the Pepsi commercial accident, while Michael is in the hospital recovering and speaking privately with Bill, he expresses that he has already begun thinking about what’s to come next. He plans to complete one final tour with his family before going solo, telling Bill, “This is my life. My path. Mine.”
What struck me wasn't the idea that Michael suddenly discovered autonomy in that hospital room. He had already been growing toward it. That's what I recognize in myself. There wasn't one dramatic day when I woke up and decided I would finally start living for me. Some realizations take months and even years to become behavior. You have to unlearn what you were taught, relearn what you actually believe, and sometimes recondition yourself to stop automatically looking outside of yourself for permission. I have been doing that work for years, in different ways and at different depths. But Michael helped something I already knew settle and take on new meaning: knowing that my life belongs to me and actually making decisions like it does are two different things, and I only get to do this lifetime once.
Another message from the film says it just as plainly. If my memory serves me right, in the very next scene, Michael is traveling from city to city on the Triumph Tour with his brothers, when we see the words written down: “Be true to who you are. Be free to create.” I'm learning that freedom isn't the absence of responsibility, consideration, wisdom, or even fear. It's being able to hear all of those things without allowing somebody else's expectations to become the loudest voice in a life they don't have to live. I can love people, consider people, learn from people, and still understand: This is my life. My path. Mine.
The World Owes Michael Jackson an Apology
Over the summer, this film has restarted conversations about what the media gave us, what it withheld, what it distorted, and how easily a human being can disappear beneath a public image.
Michael Jackson spent much of his life giving the world something to watch, listen to, imitate, study, discuss, and enjoy. Yet somewhere between the unprecedented fame and the constant fascination with his life, the person himself became increasingly easy to treat as something other than human. His appearance became conversation. His voice became conversation. His relationships, his home, his choices, his pain, and nearly every aspect of his existence became material for public consumption.
And still, people wanted the music.
His influence never disappeared, but it often felt as if the world wanted what Michael created without confronting how cruelly it treated the person who created it. We can celebrate the records, recreate the choreography, study the performances, borrow from the visual language he helped establish, and marvel at numbers very few artists will ever touch—but none of that exists separately from the human being who made it.
The world owes Michael Jackson an apology he may never receive, and I cannot speak with certainty about the afterlife, but I believe he is somewhere completely free. I believe he knows that he is still very much loved, and as long as human beings continue making music, telling stories, studying performance, and passing culture from one generation to the next, he will always remain part of these conversations.
His legacy is too deeply ingrained in the language of entertainment to disappear.
His story is history.
Knowing the Way Is Not the Same as Walking It
Michael helped me understand that my life is mine to choose. What I hadn't yet confronted was what happens after you've chosen it.
I entered this movie expecting to celebrate one of my favorite performers of all time. I did not expect it to reopen my grief, return me to my Granny's house, make me wonder where my childhood things went, or force me to confront how much of myself I had spent years negotiating with other people's expectations. I certainly didn't expect it to meet me in a season when so much of my life already felt uncertain. But somewhere across five viewings, the movie stopped asking me only to look at Michael's life and started making me look harder at my own.
I don't think autonomy is something we claim once and magically keep forever. As I continue to grow, mature, and evolve as a woman and simply as a human being, I imagine there will be new versions of myself to meet and new decisions that require me to choose for myself all over again. Maybe that's part of what makes autonomy a practice rather than a destination. The work isn't only breaking free from the expectations that once shaped you; it's remaining free enough to recognize when you've changed, when what you want has changed, and when the life you've chosen is asking something different of you.
And once I understood that, another question was already waiting for me: what happens when you know where you want to go, but getting there takes longer than you ever imagined?
The answer to this question is ultimately why it took me so long to finish this piece. I knew there was another story I wanted to experience before I closed this one. By the time I finally sat down to finish writing, I already knew I wanted these stories to live near each other. Earlier this week, I was finally able to see The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm, and to borrow the words of Travis Scott’s Bard—“a face, a fleet, a war, a man, a thought, a trick”—I’m about to enter another story: one about knowing the way, walking it, and the cost of delay when the journey home takes longer than it should.
Michael helped me understand that this path is mine.
Now, I’m ready to talk about what happens when you know the way, but have to reckon with how much of the delay might actually belong to you—and what you may have to surrender to finally move forward.
The Odyssey: The Cost of Delay arrives on The Velvet Row™ October 5, 2026.
Well, you know where to find me: center row, K12, nice and comfy with my signature snacks already secured for us. I have a feeling we're going to have plenty to talk about.
Now enough about what I think—tell me what you think in the comments below. 🎬🍿
Welcome to The Velvet Row™ !
I saved you a seat next to me .
Navigating the Row: Demo Video
Get comfy my friend! There’s plenty more to come. 😉
You’re here now—you might as well get caught up.
As always, thank you so much for taking the time to read! 🎬🍿
Until next time,
Your Beauty Experience Coach,
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Five viewings later, I know that Michael the movie did far more than just entertain me. It sent me backward into parts of my childhood I hadn't visited in years and forward into questions about the woman and creative I am still becoming. 🕺🏾🪩