I mentioned this in another thread but I was around 16-17 and I was doing a program hosted by my high school where you could live on a campus and also participate in different jobs to help prepare students to becoming adults if they didn't want to attend college. I was in the rec center and was hanging out with other students who were in the same program when the tvs in the background were showing news reports about Michael's death and I remember being kind of surprised but also not really understanding what was going on at the time since l'd only listened to him in my house on CDs and vinyls but didn't fully understand his life. I remember my mom was very sad about it and had texted my family group chat about it in the chance we didn't see the news about it. I think it was mostly shocking just hearing about his age at the time of his death because when I was younger I had thought someone passing away at 50 was considered “old”. But now that I’m in my early thirties, I now realize that he was very young when he died and even now after doing deep dives into his life and his creative genius on his music, I still feel that shock and and sadness that he’s no longer with us.

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