Today is the anniversary of Marvin Gaye’s death. I was 14, getting ready for school and heard the news on my radio. And I lost my shit. It wasn’t that he ‘just died’, I didn’t have that kind of attachment. It was that his father killed him. It was the immediate knowledge that parents killed their kids.
When in the middle of my mother’s physical rages, I often thought she would kill me. To hear that someone older than me, famous even, could be killed by their dad made it obvious to me that she could do the same. I remember her being really confused about why I was so upset. I wasn’t into musicians, really, though I was a fan of Motown and R & B. I wonder what would have happened if I’d just told her the truth of what his death meant to me.