Michael Jackson memorial watch by millions with tears,sadness in rememberance of the greatness of the King of Pop

Janet Jackson, Paris Jackson, LaToya Jackson, Jermaine Jackson and Prince Michael Jackson I during the public memorial service for Michael Jackson held at Staples Center.

With all the mourning and music, celebrity performers and soaring speeches by African American leaders at Staples Center on Tuesday, it was easy to overlook a quieter spectacle taking place. Michael Jackson's memorial served as a grand unveiling for the singer's children.

While their father was one of the most photographed men of the last half-century, his sons Prince Michael II, 7, and Prince Michael Jr., 12, and daughter Paris Michael Katherine, 11, have remained in the shadows for most of their young lives, surfacing only in paparazzi photos and until recently, wearing fanciful masks whenever they were in public.













The protracted departure of Michael Jackson from this world formally ended Tuesday morning with a private funeral at Forest Lawn and a public memorial at Staples Center. The first event was seen from afar, on television and so by the world, primarily as a sequence of arriving and departing black cars. The latter was planned from the start as a television event and carried live by all the major broadcast and cable news networks. The stars of the evening news were all on site, blinking in the sun outside the very arena where Jackson had been rehearsing his upcoming return to the stage.

Like the gold-plated casket in which he was laid to rest, and which sat before the stage at the Staples Center, the day provided the brighter coda to the darker days that preceded it. The memorial service, often referred to by reporters or commentators as a "show," seemed staged as if in partial recompense -- to Jackson himself, even more than his audience -- for the 50 London shows he'll never play. As does most any memorial service, it mixed mourning with celebration, laughter with tears. But in the way that it was universally reported on, from before its beginning until after its end, it also seemed a kind of apology for prior doubting or nasty press. Death, for a moment, wipes a slate clean.