Observing Michael Jackson's death in Memphis (2009)

Mourning Jackson on the streets of Boston, Mass.

It’s the week of Michael Jackson’s funeral, and I’m waiting for the last flight out of Memphis. Everywhere in the deserted airport you can hear CNN blaring about breaking developments in the Jackson case.

A woman beside me is wearing a Jackson memorial shirt featuring the likeness of a cherubic Jackson 5 –era Michael, engulfed by enormous angel wings. Nearby, I overhear a conversation about the price increases in Jackson vinyl albums.
Amazingly, Jackson is simultaneously both dead, and right back at the forefront of popular culture. It’s a trick not many people manage.

I find it both supremely ironic and tragic that I’m seeing all this in the Memphis airport. It’s a space where you just can’t avoid Elvis. In Memphis, it’s amazingly easy to forget “The King” died on a toilet, with an overly potent drug cocktail in his system, and long past the peak of his career.

I was eight when Elvis died. That night as I was going to bed, my mother came in and turned on the bedside radio so that I could drift to sleep listening to Elvis music and the updates about his death. She thought it was an important historical moment that I should experience.

Yet at the Memphis airport, it’s like Elvis never left.