No Single Story: The Lives We Leave Behind
By Adrian Rosenfeldt
A close friend of mine died unexpectedly. I had known him for years: his fierce intelligence, difficult personality and lifelong devotion to music, art, travel and writing. A committed atheist throughout his life, he held no affection for organised religion. But like many of us, he had been raised within a deeply Catholic world and attended a Jesuit school. As the saying goes, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”
Yet the service held in his honour was a traditional Orthodox Catholic mass complete with incense, solemn liturgy and sermons about resurrection. The mass attempted to place his life within a much older spiritual narrative. Sitting there, I became aware of a strange disjunct between these two portrayals of the same person.
After the service, some of his close friends quietly remarked that the funeral felt inauthentic. I felt this too. Yet when I mentioned this to someone standing beside me, they simply replied, “Funerals are for the family.”
For those of us who have lost someone close, recognise that our memory of them rarely survives through a single coherent narrative. Different aspects of a life persist in different ways and not always comfortably alongside one another. French philosopher Rousseau once suggested that the self is largely the product of memory. If this is true, then part of a person continues living as long as there are still people carrying that person within their consciousness, and there can never be one definitive memory.
At my friend’s funeral, he was described in terms of three simple identities: lawyer, writer and art lover. Yet none of these descriptions adequately captured the force of his personality, his strange enthusiasms or the way he moved through the world.
In the days after the funeral, I found myself thinking about other lives that cannot be encapsulated in a funeral, in a eulogy, in one memory or identity. One of those lives was Michael Jackson. Watching Netflix’s new documentary Michael Jackson: The Verdict and reading about the extraordinary box-office success of the recent biopic Michael, I found myself asking the same question that had troubled me since my friend’s funeral: is it ever possible to reduce a human life to a single authentic story?
To put it lightly, critics were not enamoured with the biopic Michael. Its Rotten Tomatoes critic score currently sits at just 39%, compared to 97% from viewers, an extraordinary disparity. The reviews I read were scathing. The film was described as “deceitful,” “superficial,” “over-simplified” and “sanitised.” The controversies and child molestation allegations surrounding Jackson’s life clearly contribute to this reaction and will again return to public attention in Netflix’s documentary.
Yet I suspect some of the hostility toward the film reflects a broader cultural shift. Being a young music fan when Thriller was released in 1982, I still remember how universally adored Jackson was at the height of his fame. The clips for Billie Jean, Beat It and Thriller felt almost supernatural at the time. How did he sing and write all those hits, design and star in those groundbreaking music videos, and choreograph those dance scenes? Looking back, it is also remarkable to think that Michael Jackson was the first black artist in America to take over the white-dominated pop charts.
My ten-year-old friends and I didn’t think about Jackson in racial terms at all. We all wanted to be Michael Jackson.
As I was driving home from the funeral on my own, one vivid memory returned to me with unusual force. Not long after my friend and I finished school, we both went to ConFest, a hippie gathering on the Murray River, with my sister and some of her friends. Despite enjoying being out in nature, my friend and I were not impressed with what we saw to be the faux primitivism around us: the earnest hippie workshops, the fire twirling, the self-conscious spirituality. At some point, partly out of boredom and partly out of frustration, I put Thriller into the boombox I had brought with me and turned the volume up loud.
People around us were horrified. In that setting, the disco rhythms and contrived mainstream glamour of Michael Jackson were beyond the pale. The music seemed to violate the festival’s entire ethos of authenticity. Without warning, my friend stood up and sprinted down a dirt path leading away from our campsite, eager to distance himself from the attention the music was attracting.
My response? I immediately grabbed the boombox and ran after him.
Having avoided exercise for most of his life, his sprint did not last long. We were now near the centre of the festival. It was Saturday night and we were surrounded by people. Bent over and struggling to catch his breath, my friend realised there was no escaping Michael Jackson. For a moment a look of irritation crossed his face, but then he burst into laughter at the sheer absurdity of the situation.
This is the way I will remember him. Not as a figure in a linear story with a punchline highlighting his earthly achievements, but as a spirit full of contradictions and feeling: intelligent, reckless, independent, lonely, short-tempered but also capable of enormous warmth and generosity.
This is how we continue living after death—not as finished stories, but as spirits, moods, songs and contradictory memories carried within the lives of others.
Dr Adrian Rosenfeldt is a writer and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches at the University of Melbourne and has written widely on culture, spirituality, and contemporary society. Adrian writes articles and hosts podcast conversations exploring spirituality and contemporary cultural life. His work is available at https://about.me/arosenfeldt
Adrian is also the author of the book, The God Debaters (2022).