Katherine Jackson doesn’t find it easy to talk about her son.
She said so herself in November 2010, when she sat down with talk show host Oprah Winfrey alongside Michael’s children. It was a family visit as much as an interview, with Michael’s mother and his kids all sharing what they remembered. Oprah.com titled its write-up of the visit “Michael Jackson’s Mother and Children Share Memories,” and Katherine’s own memories were the gentlest part of it.
“I think of my son all through the day, all the time, and I don’t like to talk about him because I get all choked up,” she told Oprah.
Michael had passed away, and the grief was still close. But she opened up anyway.
Most of the world carries a stage picture of Michael in its head. For a lot of older fans, it’s an early one like this, a young Michael singing with his brothers on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Young Michael and the Jackson 5 on “The Ed Sullivan Show”
Katherine has a lifetime of moments like that to choose from, from TV shows to concerts to awards nights.
Yet she told Oprah that one picture of Michael comes to her mind every single day. And it’s from none of those places.
Oprah’s own network, OWN, later put this interview at No. 17 in a “TV Guide’s Top 25” countdown, and this is its look back at the conversation.
Oprah’s network looks back at her interview with Michael’s family
So what does she see?
A newborn.
“A baby in my arms, naming him with my mother,” Katherine said.
That’s the picture. It’s Katherine as a young mom holding her baby boy, born on Aug 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, with her own mother, Martha Mattie Upshaw, right there beside her. The two women named him together. Naming a baby is one of those small family moments that never makes the newspapers. There are no cameras and no awards for it, just family. Long before the moonwalk and the screaming crowds, he was a baby who didn’t have a name yet, and the two of them gave him one.
Any parent or grandparent will understand why that one sticks. It comes from the days before the rest of the world ever got to share him.
If you’d like to hear Katherine and the children in the full conversation, this fan upload has the whole interview plus some behind-the-scenes moments.
Katherine and Michael’s children with Oprah in 2010
That baby grew up to be the King of Pop. This 1984 clip catches the two of them together when he was 25 and one of the most famous people on earth.
Michael and his mother Katherine in 1984
Katherine shared one more small thing with Oprah, and it’s the kind of line that stays with you after you read it.
“And sometimes during the day, I can hear his laughter in my mind.”
She didn’t need a big story to explain how she remembers her son. Coming from the mother of the King of Pop, it’s a quiet answer, and that’s exactly why it hits so hard.