This time it’s for UNESCO. I received the “Patroness of Education” award at a huge gala tonight. I spoke, again, about the critical importance of educating girls. Sitting next to me, also receiving an award for his considerable humanitarian work was Forest Whitaker.

with Forest Whitaker

Tommy and Dee Hilfiger

Also receiving awards were designer Tommy Hilfiger, singer/songwriter Ronan Keating and songwriter Denise Rich. Both of the latter said how terrific they think my honey, Richard, is, which made me happy. Jermaine Jackson performed in honor of his brother, Michael. I was able to give him an emotional hug before the gala. We hadn’t seen each other since the day in the late 1970s when I visited Michael at the home in the valley where he lived with his mother and sisters. “I was visiting and we were all sitting around the pool when you came,” Jermaine reminisced. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said, and we both looked at each other for a long moment.

An amazing British singer, Paul Potts, sang opera. I had never heard of him but wow! Not so long ago he was a broke mailman in Bristol, but he went on “Britain’s Got Talent” and knocked everyone out. He has a breathtaking voice and a great sense of humor. Paul is short and, well, rather plump. He said,” I’m not fat, it’s just that my height hasn’t caught up with my weight.” Most of us were crying when he finished his 4th aria.

The huge screen with a close up of Paul Potts singing his final aria, 'Nessun Dorma'

German school children performing at the UNESCO Gala

I have long been a fan of Forest Whitaker and we exchanged numbers with the intent of getting together in L.A. I hadn’t realized the extent to which he is a writer and producer as well as actor.

I left the gala early because I am tired and must get up early tomorrow to fly to Paris where I will meet the producer and director of my next film…a French film to be shot in french in Paris next June. It has been almost 50 years since I acted in French but I remain fluent. Then I will have dinner with all the other actors. I’m really looking forward to this event and will write and send photos tomorrow.

See you next time.

Last night Richard and I went to see “This Is It” at Rod Stewart’s home. It is an absolutely wonderful documentary all about the final show Michael had been rehearsing before he died. I hadn’t realized how far along they were with it, how polished and exciting it would be even though they were just rehearsing. All the sets, the amazing pyrotechnical effects, the choreography was in place. There were interviews with some of the dancers…young men and women who had traveled, in some cases, from other counties to try out because Michael had been their inspiration from early in their childhoods. One cried when he tried to describe how he felt. It was clear that the chance of performing with their hero was beyond their wildest dreams. There’s a wonderful scene when all the dancers who hope to be selected are on stage dancing at the same time.

Except for a very few brief moments when he walked rather than danced, there was no hint that Michael was tired or ill. His voice was as strong as could be, his face more beautiful than I’d seen since he did the Thriller video. And his dance moves were all that we have come to expect from the King of Pop.

What I really enjoyed was seeing him stop in the middle of some of the numbers and ask the musicians to do a particular moment a little differently. Clearly he liked well-placed pauses when all music would stop to allow the moment to “simmer.” Several times he’d say in his sweet, high voice, “You gotta let it simmer” or maybe the word was sizzle. And then, “Don’t play until you see me make this move” which would be, in some instances, lifting one shoulder as punctuation or flinging arm out, finger pointing.
Almost every time he’s stop and ask for something different he’d finish by saying “It’s about love,” or “God bless you.”

There was another wonderful scene when he was talking to a pianist, trying to explain the sound he was looking for…Getting the musician to do it over and over with subtle changes… So able to hone in on the smallest details of sound and movement. Afterward, the pianist spoke movingly about how no one knew the music and what it should sound like better than Michael. Clearly everyone working on the project was in awe of Michael. And in this film you can really see why.

When Michael was on stage dancing alone, the camera would pan out to the “audience” of dancers all of whom would be grooving right along with Michael, looking up at him on the stage, loving him, admiring him, rooting for him. I am moved as I write this because it hadn’t hit me till I saw the film how utterly devastating his death must have been to all these dancers and musicians who so adored him, who had worked so long and hard and who were on the very brink of taking it public.

The night the film had its premiere in downtown Los Angeles there was an unusual, high wind…so strong that trees were blown down. Unusual for this city. A friend of mine who was there said that she wasn’t the only one who was crying as she walked toward the theatre, feeling this wind was Michael’s presence.

See the movie.
See you next time,

We do not know where death awaits us:
So let us wait for it everywhere.
To practice death is to practice freedom.
A man who has learned how to die
Has unlearned how to be a slave.
Michel de Montaigne

Gerontologists have learned from their studies of the aged that traumatic events—widowhood, menopause, loss of a job, even death—are not experienced as traumas if they were anticipated and, in effect, rehearsed as part of the life cycle.

I’ve been rehearsing for my death for decades. This may seem gruesome to some people. My friend, singer Michael Jackson, certainly did. He was too scared to even begin to countenance that he might not live forever.

I even make an effort to imagine myself at 95 years old and about to die. I see myself lying on a bed, frail and wrinkled. I can feel my soft little dog (alas, it won’t be my current dog) curled under my arm. My children and grandchildren surround me. Most of my closest friends are younger than I am and I see them there as well—coming and going as their lives permit. I know that what I want most is to see love in their faces. I know that I will have to live my life between now and then so as to deserve that love. I know that, in order to be able to recognize their love and respond to it, I need to keep my mind alert. I know that in my dying I want to try to communicate my love for them along with a sense of the appropriateness of death. My friend, Zen priest Joan Halifax, wrote that “we have an intuition that a fragment of eternity within us will be liberated at the time of death.” Maybe my friends and family will be able to sense this. Joan also told me about her father two days before he died. A nurse approached him and asked, “How are you feeling, Mr. Halifax?” to which he replied, “Everything.” I’d like to be able to say this right before my death. I feel everything, the pure interconnectedness and interdependence of us all and I know that to do so I will need to learn to have an open, accepting, love-filled heart and that doesn’t just happen. It takes work.

I recognize my tendency to plan everything out according to my vision and I know that I mustn’t cling too possessively to this death narrative but the awareness of it helps me to live every day more fully. The truth is none of us can know what kind of death we will have. It could come instantly or be long and painfully drawn out. I may not be able to communicate at all when the end comes. But I’m glad that I am thinking about all this even though it may not happen for another twenty or thirty years—or more.

In 1981, my father died three minutes before I arrived at Cedar-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. When I came into his room I could see he was gone but I desperately wanted to sit with him, touch him, experience closure and try to grasp what was left when the spirit has gone. The nurses would have none of it. They insisted we leave so they could “clean him up.” Western societies do not psychologically equip us to confront death. It’s viewed as an indignity that needs to be “cleaned up.” But if you really think about it, life exists only in relation to death just as light exists only in relation to dark and sound exists only in relation to silence. Very old people know this. None of the centenarians I have interviewed were afraid of dying. On the contrary, their very proximity to it seems to give their lives exquisite meaning.

Not all societies are as death-denying as ours. All indigenous, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist cultures not only venerate the aged, they consciously cultivate a life-affirming death awareness. In Vietnam, the bones of the deceased are buried in the fields so that they will fertilize the rice that feeds their families and, thus, it is believed there is physical and spiritual continuity and the children inherit the strength of their ancestors.

In Mexico you can see death all around you as part of everyday life: Souvenir shops display miniature skeletons dancing and playing instruments and chocolate candies shaped like skeletons. On All Saints Day—what we in the U.S. have commercialized into Halloween trick or treating—families load up on wine, bread, cheese and camp out on their loved one’s graves, singing, reminiscing, and celebrating. All these customs demonstrate that part of life is rehearsing for old age and death, welcoming it with open arms, humor and respect.

Death is a democratic inevitability for every one of us. In my opinion, there’s something worse than death and that is never having fully lived. We can choose to sink into age, denying, resisting, protesting, thus missing the fruits of wholeness. Or we can be liberated to live a full and vibrant life by choosing to grow into age, accepting, letting go, embracing the emptiness with humility.

See you next time

This is the longest I’ve gone without blogging for some time. But sometimes you just have to let life play itself out without comment. Like so many people, I have been in a wash of images and feelings about Michael Jackson. I knew him as well as one could know him during the time before he did “The Wiz” and up through “Thriller.” I couldn’t pretend to understand him. There were so many complicated signals. Did he want me to be his ‘older women’ friend. He gravitated to older women. For solace? Succor? A beard? Did he want me to teach him the ropes? I never could quite figure it out. But I remember one day he was visiting me at my ranch north of Santa Barbara. It was the first time he had been in that region but he must have liked it because later he bought his ranch in that same area. Anyway, as we walked around the ranch which was perched right at the edge of the mountain overlooking Goleta, I pointed to a spot where I told him I wanted to be buried. Michael had a melt down right then and there when he heard this. He shrieked and bent over and said “no, no, no!” “ What’s the matter,” I asked. “Don’t ever talk about your dying,” he answered. “Don’t ever think about it.”

I think about death all the time. I rehearse my death. I think that’s a healthy thing to do. Death, after all, is what gives life meaning the way noise gives meaning to silence. Ooooh, I thought to myself, Michael will have a hard time of it as he ages. He will spend all his energy trying to flee what is inevitable. And now it’s happened. I like the fact that it was quick. Massive heart attacks that you don’t recover from are quick. You don’t know what hit you. That’s probably the kindest death for Michael. It’s hard to imagine him being happy as he aged. One more demon to try and evade. I like to think he’s happy now, free of his demons. Free and floating and knowing how his art continues to be revered and celebrated by all of us all over the world. It will continue.