My Mother And George Michael

On Christmas Day 2016, news broke that George Michael had died. It was late in the evening, and my mother and I were sat in front of the TV. Our friends and family had gone home, we had eaten way too much food and we were tired. My mother was asleep, in fact. I wasn’t. I was scrolling, looking for anything to watch. It was Christmas Day, surely something good would be on. But what I got were reruns, repeats, Christmas specials from the year before that I had already seen… I sort of gave up and logged onto Facebook just to pass the time. That’s when I saw it. George Michael had died. I immediately jumped out of the sofa. That couldn’t be. Or maybe it could. It was 2016, after all. I put on Sky News because who can believe anything they see on Facebook these days? And there it was. The man I had grown up with had died. My mother didn’t know. Not for another minute, when I had to gather the courage to wake her up. I was crying and I knew she would immediately know something was wrong. I gently woke her up and pointed at the TV…

Anyone who knew my mother will tell you that the first thing you need to know is that she was the world’s biggest George Michael fan. She literally had a shrine to him in her office. Books, CDs, posters, calendars, t-shirts and badges and bracelets collected from several concerts. You name it, she had it. His songs brought her joy, even the ones that were painful for him to sing, like ‘Jesus To A Child’ or ‘Praying For Time’. She would put on his music while she worked, and pretty much at any other time. ‘It’s like all of my problems have gone away!’, she would say of how his voice made her feel. She could never pick a favourite song of his, but she would always eventually settle on ‘Older’, from the album of the same name, which also gave us my personal favourite, ‘Fastlove’. She went to see him in concert about ten times or so, and I was there with her four of those times. It was the 25 Live Tour of 2007 and it was incredible. When he died, many people expressed regret at never having seen him live and I’m glad to say I did. In 2023, when Last Christmas finally hit the top spot of the UK charts, having failed to do so originally in 1984, when it was kept off number one by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, she was ecstatic.

George Michael was a constant presence in my mother’s life, and as a result, he was a constant presence in mine too. On Christmas Day 2016, I felt as though I had lost a friend. A relative, even. Ten years later, I still miss him. His music made the world dance, and think, and live. He stood up for what he believed in, even when people tried to bring him down. And not just people, the paparazzi too. The video for ‘Outside’ is just as iconic now as it was back in 1998 and it is a masterclass on fighting back the right way.

At my mother’s funeral, I said to my cousin that I hoped she and George Michael were dancing together in the afterlife. Because I know she went looking for him the second she got up there. That’s why I’m not worried about where she might be these days. She is in good company.