Michael Jackson’s Grave: Where He Is Buried and Why No One Can Visit

On what would have been Michael Jackson’s 61st birthday, a man carried exactly 61 sunflowers to the building where he is buried. Not roses. Sunflowers. Because Michael loved them. A detail almost nobody outside his fandom knows. He counted out 60 and left them against the marble where every tribute to Michael Jackson has been left since 2009.

Then he told someone that the 61st one was somewhere else. He had gotten it inside. Close to Michael. Thousands of roses have stopped at that wall in 16 years. Letters from six continents, paintings, photographs, notes written on the glass. All of it stops. One sunflower got through and the man who did it never explained how.

Let me take you somewhere most people will never stand. Not the front of the building where the flowers pile up and the cameras are. Somewhere else. Around the side, past the archway, along a stretch of grass nobody has any official reason to walk on. There is a path there. Not a paved walkway.

Not something the cemetery built. A narrow trail worn into the ground by feet. Thousands of them. Over 16 years. All walk in the same route to the same spot. Nobody advertised it. There’s no sign. No marker. Nothing on any map they hand you at the gate. Fans learned it from other fans and kept coming until the grass gave up. At the end of that path is a small memorial the cemetery never made.

A few feet from where Michael Jackson actually lies, on the other side of the wall. A visitor who found it described the feeling this way. Forest Lawn is already a quiet place, but on that path the stillness is overwhelming. There is nothing but the hum of Michael’s music inside your own head. If you want to keep hearing the stories nobody tells, subscribe before we go further.

Because the reason that path exists, the reason people wear a trail into a lawn to stand next to a wall, comes down to something almost nobody outside that cemetery understands. Michael Jackson is buried in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. It is not a building that was chosen casually.

It is a concrete and marble Gothic cathedral for the dead, modeled on the Camposanto in Genoa, Italy. Construction began in 1917, and it was built by the explicit intention of the man who commissioned it to last a thousand years. Its terraces were completed in alphabetical order, each one named for a flower. Azalea, Begonia, Coleus, Dahlia, Evergreen, Fuchsia, Gardenia, Holly, Iris, Jasmine.

Michael Jackson is in Holly, the eighth flower. Inside, there is a stained glass recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, replicas of Michelangelo’s statues, and a row of crypts that money cannot buy reserved for people the cemeteries council has designated as immortals individuals judged to have contributed a service to humanity.

Sealed at that windows dedication is a time capsule not to be opened until the year 3000. That is the scale of thinking behind this place not decades millennia. Wait. Don’t miss this detail. Holly Terrace the section where Michael Jackson lies has been closed to the general public since 1933. Not since 2009. Since 1933.

25 years before Michael was born and 76 years before anyone had any reason to think about protecting him. His family did not build him a fortress. They found one that had already stood there for three generations and they put him inside it. For years the standard line was that nobody knew exactly where in that building he was.

A reporter in 2009 wrote that the location might forever remain unknown to all but a select few. That is no longer true. Michael Jackson lies at the end of the Sanctuary of Ascension. His sarcophagus sits where the Ascension windows throw colored light across it. Holly Terrace is next to the Memorial Terrace the section that most resembles a Gothic Cathedral.

Soaring arches dim lighting hanging lamps stained glass all of it built for people who will never see it. The corridor has a name. Documentarians have described it. People know where he is now. And here’s the thing no one ever talks about. It makes absolutely no difference. Knowing the address does not get you within a hundred feet of him.

And the reason is stranger than a locked door. He did not arrive there quickly. Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. He was not laid to rest until September 3rd, 70 days later. On July 7th, his casket was brought out from the Hall of Liberty at Forest Lawn and driven across Los Angeles to the public memorial at Staples Center.

That morning, live on television, as the casket held on the casket emerging from the building, an anchor said out loud what nobody in the newsroom could confirm. The question now is whether it is headed to Staples Center. And that question has yet to be answered. His body was on live television and even the press did not know where it was going.

The casket itself was solid bronze with 14 karat gold-plated handles, custom made, reported at somewhere between 25 and 30,000 dollars. Gold for a man the world had spent decades calling a king. The burial finally happened on a Thursday evening under a full moon. A black hearse carried him through the gates while hundreds of fans stood outside in the dark screaming his name.

Behind it came two dozen identical SUVs carrying his family, deliberately indistinguishable, so no photographer could tell which one held whom. 400 media credentials had been issued for that night. Every one of those reporters was held behind a barricade. Footage of the ceremony beginning was limited to what helicopters could catch from the air.

Ask yourself what it says that even on the last night the family had to disguise which car they were sitting in. His five brothers carried him in. Each of them wore a bright red tie and a single crystal-studded glove. The glove, one on each brother, as they carried their brother’s body through the doors of the Great Mausoleum.

The casket was crowned and heavily draped in flowers. The room beyond was a sea of white. 11-year-old Paris cried as they entered and was comforted by her aunt, LaToya. Then Paris and her brothers, Prince Michael, 12, and Blanket, seven, began the service by placing a bejeweled crown on top of their father’s golden casket.

They held themselves together through almost all of the hour and a half that followed. Gladys Knight sang Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer set to music. A guest who was there, speaking anonymously, said her voice soared through the vast mausoleum and moved many of the mourners to tears. When it ended, most of the 200 people present simply held on to each other.

And his mother never made it in. Earlier that evening, faced with her son’s final resting place, Katherine Jackson became overcome and turned back. According to the guest who described the night, it was not clear whether she ever went inside at all. By the time it was over, she appeared extremely weary and had to be helped to her car.

A 79-year-old woman standing outside a marble building in the dark, unable to make herself walk through the door. Don’t miss this. Because that door has stayed shut for almost everyone ever since. And the way it stays shut is stranger than any lock. Getting into Holly Terrace is not simply a matter of being family.

According to accounts from people who have researched access, each individual laid to rest in that section reportedly has their own family password. To get in, you need the name of the person you have come to see and the word that goes with it. Once you are inside, you are watched. Closed-circuit cameras cover the interior.

They are not there to catch vandals. They are there, by these accounts, to confirm that you go to your loved one and come straight back. And if you deviate, if you are legitimately inside with a legitimate name and a legitimate password, and you turn and walk toward Michael Jackson, you are escorted out. Photography inside is prohibited entirely.

Not discouraged, not limited to certain areas, prohibited. If you have access, you may look. You may not record. So, count the layers. A cemetery with controlled entry. Inside it, a building closed to the general public since 1933. Inside that, a section restricted to family and pass holders. Inside that, a password tied to one specific name.

Inside that, cameras confirming your route. And at the end of all of it, an instruction that you may not go to him even if you are already standing in the building. Six walls, one inside the next. One documentarian who has spent years visiting the graves of famous people said plainly that he was not aware of anybody who had ever actually gotten in to see it.

There is one documented exception, and it is almost funny in how ordinary it is. Fans have noticed that the florist gets to go in. The man who delivers and arranges the flowers walks through those doors on a working schedule. Past the password, past the cameras, and stands where none of them will ever stand. He is not alone in there.

In March 2011, less than 2 years after Michael, Elizabeth Taylor was laid to rest at the same cemetery. Sit with that for a moment. Elizabeth Taylor was the one major star who publicly stood beside Michael in 1993 when most of the industry went silent to protect itself. She had, by her own reckoning, too long a career and too many of her own scandals to fear a backlash.

She used that freedom to defend him when almost nobody else would. And in July 2018, 9 years after his son, Joe Jackson was buried at Forest Lawn as well. A fan standing outside on Michael’s birthday put the geography simply, pointing as he said it. Elizabeth Taylor is over there. Michael is right here in Holly Terrace.

And somewhere all the way down there is his dad. The woman who defended him and the man who shaped him, the friendship that cost her nothing to give and the childhood that cost him everything, are in the same 300 acres of California hillside as Michael Jackson. Ask yourself what it means that the two people who most defined the beginning and the end of his public life are now lying within walking distance of him.

And that none of the three of them can be visited by the people who loved them most. The front of Holly Terrace is where nearly everything gets left. It is also, by the description of the people who go there, a cold place to grieve. There are signs telling you to keep out. There are multiple security cameras.

The windows are blacked out. You cannot see anything through the glass, only your own reflection and the dark behind it. Fans leave flowers and cards anyway. They write directly on the glass. “I love you, MJ, my hero.” A heart. They sign with the names of the countries they flew in from. Hungary, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, the Netherlands, China, Sweden.

One visitor, looking at the pile, said what everyone eventually says out loud in that spot. “There are a lot of famous people here in California, but he was famous everywhere.” Someone left a tag from the Grammy Museum, just the tag from a visit they had made a day or two earlier, placed there like a receipt showing where they had been on their way to see him.

Don’t miss this because none of it stays. Visitors who arrive early in the morning sometimes find nothing at all. The flowers, the cards, the paintings, the notes, cleared away, the surface returned to bare stone. Then the next fan arrives from Sweden or China or Slovakia and builds it again from nothing. Every tribute at that wall is temporary by design.

The people leaving them know this. They leave them anyway. Ask yourself what you would write to someone you never met, knowing they will never read it, knowing it will be gone by morning, and knowing you will come back next year and write another one. The cards left there are not generic. One, from a fan in China, opens by clearing up a misunderstanding nobody asked about.

She tells him she is not Billie Jean. She is Linland Zang. She says she has loved him from young to old, and asks him to remember her face. Then she asks him for something. To come and pick her up when she dies. She writes it as though they had already agreed on this, and reminds him that he promised. Another was written by a young woman who first found him as an 8-year-old child.

She notes that 17 years have passed since he earned his wings, and that time flies. Then she works out the arithmetic of her own life against his absence, and arrives somewhere unexpected. She is 21 now, and by her own counting, she has officially become his big sister. A third came with paintings. The visitor explains that this is her second time bringing her artwork to him.

That out of love, she has created a great many pieces inspired by him. And that alongside the paintings, she made a collage frame for Valentine’s Day. She points out one specific cartoon figure at the very top. The birthday drawing she made for him the previous year. She closes by hoping everything is well with him in his own Neverland.

These are not written to a dead celebrity. They are written to someone the writers are certain can still hear them on the outside of a building none of them will ever be allowed to enter. There is a version of Michael Jackson’s grave that fans can actually stand next to, and it is 2,000 mi away. In Detroit, there is a symbolic grave, a marker with no body beneath it, placed by people who simply wanted somewhere to go.

It exists precisely because the real one is unreachable, an entire second site built out of nothing but the need to have a place. That is what the wall creates, not distance from Michael Jackson, exactly. Distance from the idea of reaching him at all, which the fans then solve however they can. With a stone in Michigan, with roses stacked against marble in Glendale, with a path worn into grass.

What you’ve seen so far is nothing, because on one specific afternoon in heat well over 100°, one man solved it in a way nobody has managed before or since. He arrived at Forest Lawn on what would have been Michael’s 61st birthday, carrying 61 sunflowers. He had taken days off work to be there. He had been to 35 [snorts] Michael Jackson concerts in his life.

Another fan who filmed that day had seen him a year earlier at the 10-year anniversary, standing alone against a railing by himself, and had felt bad watching him stand there, and was glad to see him back. He brought sunflowers rather than roses because Michael loved sunflowers. Most people do not know that. He did.

He counted out 60 and left them at the front of the building with everything else. Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that the 61st one was somewhere else. He had hidden it, he said, “Really close to Michael.” He did not explain how. He has never explained how. Thousands of roses have stopped at that wall since 2009.

Letters from six continents, paintings, museum tags, notes written on glass. All of it stops at the marble. One sunflower got through. Ask yourself what it takes to be the one person in 16 years who found a way. And then to say nothing about it except that you did. There is one more thing worth saying about where he ended up.

Michael Jackson spent his whole life trying to be somewhere nobody could find him. He is now in the one place on Earth where that is completely, permanently true. He wanted to disappear. In the end, he managed it, just not in any way anyone wanted. Every year the flowers arrive and stop at the wall. There is something almost unbearable in that image, and also something correct about it.

The people who loved him most cannot reach him. Neither can the people who hunted him. The tabloids that followed him for four decades, the photographers who chased his car, the crews who camped outside his gates, all of them stop at exactly the same line as the woman who flew in from Sweden with a single rose.

For the first time in his life, nobody gets special access. Nobody gets closer than anybody else. Thousands of people have worn a path into the grass outside, walking to a spot the cemetery never marked to stand a wall’s thickness away from him. And one man on a 100° August afternoon counted out 61 sunflowers, left 60 of them with everyone else’s, and got the last one through.

If you feel something reading this, if the thought of someone watched by everyone constantly for 40 years finally being somewhere nobody can look at him lands somewhere heavy. That is not really about a cemetery. Michael Jackson wanted to be left alone. He got what he wanted. And the people who love him are still outside in the grass wearing a path toward a wall.

Michael Jackson’s Grave: Where He Is Buried and Why No One Can Visit

On what would have been Michael Jackson’s 61st birthday, a man carried exactly 61 sunflowers to the building where he is buried. Not roses. Sunflowers. Because Michael loved them. A detail almost nobody outside his fandom knows. He counted out 60 and left them against the marble where every tribute to Michael Jackson has been left since 2009.

Then he told someone that the 61st one was somewhere else. He had gotten it inside. Close to Michael. Thousands of roses have stopped at that wall in 16 years. Letters from six continents, paintings, photographs, notes written on the glass. All of it stops. One sunflower got through and the man who did it never explained how.

Let me take you somewhere most people will never stand. Not the front of the building where the flowers pile up and the cameras are. Somewhere else. Around the side, past the archway, along a stretch of grass nobody has any official reason to walk on. There is a path there. Not a paved walkway.

Not something the cemetery built. A narrow trail worn into the ground by feet. Thousands of them. Over 16 years. All walk in the same route to the same spot. Nobody advertised it. There’s no sign. No marker. Nothing on any map they hand you at the gate. Fans learned it from other fans and kept coming until the grass gave up. At the end of that path is a small memorial the cemetery never made.

A few feet from where Michael Jackson actually lies, on the other side of the wall. A visitor who found it described the feeling this way. Forest Lawn is already a quiet place, but on that path the stillness is overwhelming. There is nothing but the hum of Michael’s music inside your own head. If you want to keep hearing the stories nobody tells, subscribe before we go further.

Because the reason that path exists, the reason people wear a trail into a lawn to stand next to a wall, comes down to something almost nobody outside that cemetery understands. Michael Jackson is buried in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. It is not a building that was chosen casually.

It is a concrete and marble Gothic cathedral for the dead, modeled on the Camposanto in Genoa, Italy. Construction began in 1917, and it was built by the explicit intention of the man who commissioned it to last a thousand years. Its terraces were completed in alphabetical order, each one named for a flower. Azalea, Begonia, Coleus, Dahlia, Evergreen, Fuchsia, Gardenia, Holly, Iris, Jasmine.

Michael Jackson is in Holly, the eighth flower. Inside, there is a stained glass recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, replicas of Michelangelo’s statues, and a row of crypts that money cannot buy reserved for people the cemeteries council has designated as immortals individuals judged to have contributed a service to humanity.

Sealed at that windows dedication is a time capsule not to be opened until the year 3000. That is the scale of thinking behind this place not decades millennia. Wait. Don’t miss this detail. Holly Terrace the section where Michael Jackson lies has been closed to the general public since 1933. Not since 2009. Since 1933.

25 years before Michael was born and 76 years before anyone had any reason to think about protecting him. His family did not build him a fortress. They found one that had already stood there for three generations and they put him inside it. For years the standard line was that nobody knew exactly where in that building he was.

A reporter in 2009 wrote that the location might forever remain unknown to all but a select few. That is no longer true. Michael Jackson lies at the end of the Sanctuary of Ascension. His sarcophagus sits where the Ascension windows throw colored light across it. Holly Terrace is next to the Memorial Terrace the section that most resembles a Gothic Cathedral.

Soaring arches dim lighting hanging lamps stained glass all of it built for people who will never see it. The corridor has a name. Documentarians have described it. People know where he is now. And here’s the thing no one ever talks about. It makes absolutely no difference. Knowing the address does not get you within a hundred feet of him.

And the reason is stranger than a locked door. He did not arrive there quickly. Michael Jackson died on June 25th, 2009. He was not laid to rest until September 3rd, 70 days later. On July 7th, his casket was brought out from the Hall of Liberty at Forest Lawn and driven across Los Angeles to the public memorial at Staples Center.

That morning, live on television, as the casket held on the casket emerging from the building, an anchor said out loud what nobody in the newsroom could confirm. The question now is whether it is headed to Staples Center. And that question has yet to be answered. His body was on live television and even the press did not know where it was going.

The casket itself was solid bronze with 14 karat gold-plated handles, custom made, reported at somewhere between 25 and 30,000 dollars. Gold for a man the world had spent decades calling a king. The burial finally happened on a Thursday evening under a full moon. A black hearse carried him through the gates while hundreds of fans stood outside in the dark screaming his name.

Behind it came two dozen identical SUVs carrying his family, deliberately indistinguishable, so no photographer could tell which one held whom. 400 media credentials had been issued for that night. Every one of those reporters was held behind a barricade. Footage of the ceremony beginning was limited to what helicopters could catch from the air.

Ask yourself what it says that even on the last night the family had to disguise which car they were sitting in. His five brothers carried him in. Each of them wore a bright red tie and a single crystal-studded glove. The glove, one on each brother, as they carried their brother’s body through the doors of the Great Mausoleum.

The casket was crowned and heavily draped in flowers. The room beyond was a sea of white. 11-year-old Paris cried as they entered and was comforted by her aunt, LaToya. Then Paris and her brothers, Prince Michael, 12, and Blanket, seven, began the service by placing a bejeweled crown on top of their father’s golden casket.

They held themselves together through almost all of the hour and a half that followed. Gladys Knight sang Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer set to music. A guest who was there, speaking anonymously, said her voice soared through the vast mausoleum and moved many of the mourners to tears. When it ended, most of the 200 people present simply held on to each other.

And his mother never made it in. Earlier that evening, faced with her son’s final resting place, Katherine Jackson became overcome and turned back. According to the guest who described the night, it was not clear whether she ever went inside at all. By the time it was over, she appeared extremely weary and had to be helped to her car.

A 79-year-old woman standing outside a marble building in the dark, unable to make herself walk through the door. Don’t miss this. Because that door has stayed shut for almost everyone ever since. And the way it stays shut is stranger than any lock. Getting into Holly Terrace is not simply a matter of being family.

According to accounts from people who have researched access, each individual laid to rest in that section reportedly has their own family password. To get in, you need the name of the person you have come to see and the word that goes with it. Once you are inside, you are watched. Closed-circuit cameras cover the interior.

They are not there to catch vandals. They are there, by these accounts, to confirm that you go to your loved one and come straight back. And if you deviate, if you are legitimately inside with a legitimate name and a legitimate password, and you turn and walk toward Michael Jackson, you are escorted out. Photography inside is prohibited entirely.

Not discouraged, not limited to certain areas, prohibited. If you have access, you may look. You may not record. So, count the layers. A cemetery with controlled entry. Inside it, a building closed to the general public since 1933. Inside that, a section restricted to family and pass holders. Inside that, a password tied to one specific name.

Inside that, cameras confirming your route. And at the end of all of it, an instruction that you may not go to him even if you are already standing in the building. Six walls, one inside the next. One documentarian who has spent years visiting the graves of famous people said plainly that he was not aware of anybody who had ever actually gotten in to see it.

There is one documented exception, and it is almost funny in how ordinary it is. Fans have noticed that the florist gets to go in. The man who delivers and arranges the flowers walks through those doors on a working schedule. Past the password, past the cameras, and stands where none of them will ever stand. He is not alone in there.

In March 2011, less than 2 years after Michael, Elizabeth Taylor was laid to rest at the same cemetery. Sit with that for a moment. Elizabeth Taylor was the one major star who publicly stood beside Michael in 1993 when most of the industry went silent to protect itself. She had, by her own reckoning, too long a career and too many of her own scandals to fear a backlash.

She used that freedom to defend him when almost nobody else would. And in July 2018, 9 years after his son, Joe Jackson was buried at Forest Lawn as well. A fan standing outside on Michael’s birthday put the geography simply, pointing as he said it. Elizabeth Taylor is over there. Michael is right here in Holly Terrace.

And somewhere all the way down there is his dad. The woman who defended him and the man who shaped him, the friendship that cost her nothing to give and the childhood that cost him everything, are in the same 300 acres of California hillside as Michael Jackson. Ask yourself what it means that the two people who most defined the beginning and the end of his public life are now lying within walking distance of him.

And that none of the three of them can be visited by the people who loved them most. The front of Holly Terrace is where nearly everything gets left. It is also, by the description of the people who go there, a cold place to grieve. There are signs telling you to keep out. There are multiple security cameras.

The windows are blacked out. You cannot see anything through the glass, only your own reflection and the dark behind it. Fans leave flowers and cards anyway. They write directly on the glass. “I love you, MJ, my hero.” A heart. They sign with the names of the countries they flew in from. Hungary, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, the Netherlands, China, Sweden.

One visitor, looking at the pile, said what everyone eventually says out loud in that spot. “There are a lot of famous people here in California, but he was famous everywhere.” Someone left a tag from the Grammy Museum, just the tag from a visit they had made a day or two earlier, placed there like a receipt showing where they had been on their way to see him.

Don’t miss this because none of it stays. Visitors who arrive early in the morning sometimes find nothing at all. The flowers, the cards, the paintings, the notes, cleared away, the surface returned to bare stone. Then the next fan arrives from Sweden or China or Slovakia and builds it again from nothing. Every tribute at that wall is temporary by design.

The people leaving them know this. They leave them anyway. Ask yourself what you would write to someone you never met, knowing they will never read it, knowing it will be gone by morning, and knowing you will come back next year and write another one. The cards left there are not generic. One, from a fan in China, opens by clearing up a misunderstanding nobody asked about.

She tells him she is not Billie Jean. She is Linland Zang. She says she has loved him from young to old, and asks him to remember her face. Then she asks him for something. To come and pick her up when she dies. She writes it as though they had already agreed on this, and reminds him that he promised. Another was written by a young woman who first found him as an 8-year-old child.

She notes that 17 years have passed since he earned his wings, and that time flies. Then she works out the arithmetic of her own life against his absence, and arrives somewhere unexpected. She is 21 now, and by her own counting, she has officially become his big sister. A third came with paintings. The visitor explains that this is her second time bringing her artwork to him.

That out of love, she has created a great many pieces inspired by him. And that alongside the paintings, she made a collage frame for Valentine’s Day. She points out one specific cartoon figure at the very top. The birthday drawing she made for him the previous year. She closes by hoping everything is well with him in his own Neverland.

These are not written to a dead celebrity. They are written to someone the writers are certain can still hear them on the outside of a building none of them will ever be allowed to enter. There is a version of Michael Jackson’s grave that fans can actually stand next to, and it is 2,000 mi away. In Detroit, there is a symbolic grave, a marker with no body beneath it, placed by people who simply wanted somewhere to go.

It exists precisely because the real one is unreachable, an entire second site built out of nothing but the need to have a place. That is what the wall creates, not distance from Michael Jackson, exactly. Distance from the idea of reaching him at all, which the fans then solve however they can. With a stone in Michigan, with roses stacked against marble in Glendale, with a path worn into grass.

What you’ve seen so far is nothing, because on one specific afternoon in heat well over 100°, one man solved it in a way nobody has managed before or since. He arrived at Forest Lawn on what would have been Michael’s 61st birthday, carrying 61 sunflowers. He had taken days off work to be there. He had been to 35 [snorts] Michael Jackson concerts in his life.

Another fan who filmed that day had seen him a year earlier at the 10-year anniversary, standing alone against a railing by himself, and had felt bad watching him stand there, and was glad to see him back. He brought sunflowers rather than roses because Michael loved sunflowers. Most people do not know that. He did.

He counted out 60 and left them at the front of the building with everything else. Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that the 61st one was somewhere else. He had hidden it, he said, “Really close to Michael.” He did not explain how. He has never explained how. Thousands of roses have stopped at that wall since 2009.

Letters from six continents, paintings, museum tags, notes written on glass. All of it stops at the marble. One sunflower got through. Ask yourself what it takes to be the one person in 16 years who found a way. And then to say nothing about it except that you did. There is one more thing worth saying about where he ended up.

Michael Jackson spent his whole life trying to be somewhere nobody could find him. He is now in the one place on Earth where that is completely, permanently true. He wanted to disappear. In the end, he managed it, just not in any way anyone wanted. Every year the flowers arrive and stop at the wall. There is something almost unbearable in that image, and also something correct about it.

The people who loved him most cannot reach him. Neither can the people who hunted him. The tabloids that followed him for four decades, the photographers who chased his car, the crews who camped outside his gates, all of them stop at exactly the same line as the woman who flew in from Sweden with a single rose.

For the first time in his life, nobody gets special access. Nobody gets closer than anybody else. Thousands of people have worn a path into the grass outside, walking to a spot the cemetery never marked to stand a wall’s thickness away from him. And one man on a 100° August afternoon counted out 61 sunflowers, left 60 of them with everyone else’s, and got the last one through.

If you feel something reading this, if the thought of someone watched by everyone constantly for 40 years finally being somewhere nobody can look at him lands somewhere heavy. That is not really about a cemetery. Michael Jackson wanted to be left alone. He got what he wanted. And the people who love him are still outside in the grass wearing a path toward a wall.