It’s been a week since the King of Pop died, and already the vultures are picking at his carcass. Seems like everyone who ever shared a minute of time with Michael Jackson has come out of the woodwork to claim a little reflected glory for themselves, none more egregious than Jackson’s own father (who answered a question at the BET Awards about how his family was holding up by plugging his record label). Stay classy, Joe.

When I was a little kid, Michael Jackson was huge. In the Eighties, he was one of the few musical icons who transcended genres and barriers. Before the freakshow that began with the skin-whitening, or the multiple plastic surgeries, or the sleepovers with ten-year-olds that eventually got him into a world of trouble, Michael Jackson was simply “Michael,” a worldwide phenomenon. Then he became a walking punchline.

It’s hard to assess Jackson’s legacy such a short time after his passing, mostly because like a lot of people I have a hard time processing it. It’s not as if Jackson’s death could be ascribed to anything natural; fifty-year-olds rarely drop dead just like that without a little help from the prescription pills department. And to watch the omnipresent news reports dealing with Jackson’s death, you’d think that he’d been in the public eye every single day, instead of the recluse that he became over the last twenty years of his life. There’s the troubling legacy of allegations against him for his conduct with young boys, the truth of which I suspect we’ll never really know but which hasn’t stopped those who mourn him as the King of Pop this week from speculating and quite frankly slandering him years before. When people express a hatred for the media, it’s moments like this that they’re usually referring to, the disingenuous “mourning” of a public figure who was lambasted in public only a short time before. Granted, the time for serious examinations of what Jackson may have been guilty of is a little further down the road, once the family has had time to bury their troubled son.

The real tragedy of the “Wacko Jacko” saga is the fact that, quite frankly, Michael Jackson never grew up, and indeed never had a chance to. He was pushed out into the spotlight by his money-hungry father at an early age, hugely famous by nine years old, and even more famous by his early twenties. Jackson never had the chance to have anything even approaching a “normal” childhood, what with allegations that his father was a tyrant and well-practiced when it came to physical and mental abuse (you could argue that Michael’s constant alterations were a direct result of his father’s abuse). The death certificate might say “fifty years old,” but in reality Jackson was still a young child in his mind, forever trapped in a world of fame and privilege that was not of his own making, and transparently false.

None of this is to say that, once he passed on, Michael Jackson’s troubled past should excuse anything he might have done that transgressed societal norms regarding children. But chances are, the truth of what happened behind the walls of Neverland Ranch will never be heard. For every kid who may indeed have suffered abuse of some sort, there are a million more who were held up by their sycophantic parents to be “buddies” with Jackson, blinded by the fame he possessed into not realizing how wrong it is for a grown man to associate with young children as if he were one of them. Joe Jackson comes off like “father of the year” compared to them.

I do mourn Michael Jackson, though, for what he was and what he could have been, if his demons hadn’t gotten the better of him. The great artists are all miserable to some extent, and Michael may have been the most miserable of them all. But for a brief moment in time, he was a trailblazer and a massively successful performer. When all the jokes have been told and the tabloid stories fade from memory, let’s hope that will be part of his legacy.