A Memorial for Michael

Saturday January 31, 2026 at 2:00 pm Hong Kong time, we held a public memorial for all who knew Michael to have a chance to pay their respects to a great man who was very loved.

We were able to live stream the memorial via YouTube, and friends and family members from around the globe tuned in to hear a message about how Michael brought wonder to the world and stories of what he meant to his family and friends. The same link is still available for anyone to watch the recording. We invite you to watch it by clicking this link.

It was a beautiful day. Several people journeyed to Hong Kong from America, Macau, China, Thailand, the Philippines, and France to join my sons and I. So many of our local friends and extended family from all over Hong Kong were there, and I think Michael would have loved to see our many circles colliding in one place. Online, there were people represented from nearly every time zone around the globe.

I was completely humbled by the outpouring of support from so many places. It’s difficult to know what kind of impact you have on others unless they take the time to tell you about it. Michael was so humble about his accomplishments, leaving it up to me to brag about what an awesome guy he was. I treasure every message, card, and conversation with people who took the time to tell my sons and I what it was like to work with or for Michael, to know him as a friend, or be raised with him in a family. I know he was aware that I thought he was terrific, and I hope he had a small inkling of what others believed about him as well.

Michael and I loved planning events together — birthdays, Christmas, Taco Tuesday, Park Days, Field Trips, and so much more.

We relished making all the details thoughtful and meaningful and fun. The last event we worked on together was a big milestone birthday party for me a few days before Michael was diagnosed with Acute Leukemia. Michael had booked a cinema so we could share my favorite film we watch each year on my birthday with a crowd, and then hired a bagpiper to surprise everyone with songs from the movie. We created little themed gift bags of useful items which tied in to the film, got a popcorn machine, and rented a Photo Booth for our friends to be able to take home a souvenir of a truly epic event.

Planning Michael’s memorial was a wild ride of conflicting emotions. On one hand, there were decisions to be made… what songs to choose, who should speak, what small important details should we include. I’d have a small thrill of almost-excitement at the idea of creating something for a group of people to enjoy together. And then the reality of what we were actually planning and the reason we were sitting there planning it would hit and that small thrill of almost-excitement would turn to nausea and horror.

We have always been a strong team and I could speak confidently about what he would like and what he wouldn’t care about at all. But the fact that I was making decisions about how best to honor Michael without lots of late-night conversations with my sweetheart was uncomfortable territory because there was nothing at all we didn’t discuss. In the last year of Michael’s life when there was little outside stimulation due to living in such careful isolation, we’d constantly play what if or would you rather games. Our conversation ranged from the mundane to the morbid, but my point is I intimately know Michael’s thought process and his likes and dislikes. The planning of this event to honor Michael made me realize how even though I can create something without his input, I really don’t want to. There’s so much to untangle there which will take time to process.

Here are a few behind the scenes details from the memorial.

The songs chosen represent the last year in important ways. Great Are You Lord and Reckless Love were favorited and appeared on several of Michael’s playlists in both Apple Music and Spotify. I (badly) sang Great Are You Lord over Michael while he was in the ICU on the respirator because of the line, “It’s your breath in our lungs.” I prayed God would step in to breathe since Michael could not do it on his own. And Reckless Love was forever a favorite of Michael’s simply because of the idea that there is nothing we can do to make God love us any more, God is already coming after us, arms wide open, exactly as we are. It was a profound idea for Michael, who always wanted to be perceived as being good, making the right choices, doing the right things, whereas the idea presented in this song is that before we could even take our first breath we were already loved by a good God. Our mere existence makes us worthy of being loved. These songs were an easy choice, but very hard to sing while grieving the fact that so many prayers were not answered in a way that kept Michael here with us, breathing.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, we knew we wanted to do a slideshow. Being the family documentarian, I have thousands and thousands of photos of Michael and our family and friends. I asked Michael’s siblings to send me their favorites of their family growing up, and then did a quick pass of 30+ years of my life with Michael. I started with over 600 photos, and my son Benjamin managed to fit most of them in after I cut it down to just under 500. Next was deciding on the music to go with it.

While Michael was in the ICU, I would play soft music on my phone to help bring a calm mood to a place where noisy chaos and death surrounded us.

He wasn’t allowed to keep his phone or iPad with him because of how frequently they were placing him under deep sedation, but he loved music so I made sure to bring song into his room each time I was there. Michael and I both loved the Beatles with great passion, their music was the soundtrack to much of our life, and a friend even sang a Beatles song at our wedding. It made sense that the Beatles should somehow be part of this day.

After Michael passed, I opened my phone to play music and saw I had paused in the middle of Here Comes the Sun. It was the last song he ever heard. The lyrics made me weep… little darlin’ it’s been a long, cold lonely winter. This last year of Michael’s life was indeed long and cold and lonely in every possible way. We never saw an end to it. It’s actually a very hopeful song, reminding us the Sun is coming back along with smiles on our faces, and the boys and I felt strongly it needed to be included. It’s a very short song, so we went through the Beatles catalog to see if there was another short song to combine which could then be played during the memorial. I Will is another short song with deep meaning to us, embodying the idea of loving someone for always, in all circumstances, whether together or apart. Next was finding someone meaningful to sing them. Wildly, my this-will-never-happen, wishful-thinking, very-first-pick choice was able to fly to Hong Kong to make it happen.

We have a whole extended family of redheads who have walked closely together with Michael and I through a ton of pretty awful stuff over the last decade. Melissa and Casey Caddell were among the first ugly-crying calls I made when Michael was diagnosed, and have been so faithful to text and call and pray for us each and every day. Every moment of crisis has seen one of them available for support and wise counsel. When Melissa said that not only she and her husband, but all three of her daughters would be coming over for the memorial, the boys and I knew Uncle Michael would want middle sister and recording artist Maddy to be the one to sing. He has followed her career from film and television to music so closely, and while she has a lot of fans, fellow middle child Michael was certainly one of her most enthusiastic. Having her there to share her gift of song was so beautiful and perfect and I’m so sad Michael wasn’t sitting next to me getting choked up over this meaningful moment.

There was a very small, private cremation service back in December, and I’d asked my sons if they wanted to speak about their Dad then. They both said they’d rather wait and speak at the memorial, which they did, with heartbreaking tenderness over the loss of their irreplaceable father. I knew Michael’s youngest sister Heidi was coming, and we asked her to speak right away. She has a unique viewpoint, having flown out to Hong Kong twice last year, undergoing testing to see if she could be a bone marrow donor for her brother. She was a perfect match, but ultimately discarded as a possibility (more on that on a previous post). And for the final speaker, an old friend of Michael’s messaged me to say he was flying in to be here with us. Greg Chavez knew Michael from the time they both got hired as stage techs at Disneyland in California, before I ever met Michael. Way back in the day, Greg would watch our kitty Bruce-the-Cat when Michael and I would go out of town, and our lives paralleled through the years with weddings and kids and career changes. He’s an amazing writer, and when he said he’d be coming, I asked him to speak, to share about the days when Michael was first starting out in the career which took us all around the globe. He shared a story I’d never heard before and I’m so grateful for that.

Another one of Michael’s sisters, Heather (you can never have too many Heathers in one family!) also flew in for the memorial, along with her husband Layne and Heidi’s husband Clay. The weekend before Michael’s memorial had been their mother’s funeral, and all three of his sisters had shared during the service for Carol. I know it was heavy to have back-to-back ceremonies for two family members, but the boys and I still wanted her to be a part of remembering her brother. She was able to speak on behalf of us and the entire family to express gratitude for the way we have been so thoughtfully supported during this dark and heavy season, from diagnosis to treatment to ultimately losing the fight for Michael’s life. It meant so much to hear her perspective of how you and many others made such a difference in our lives.

A final touch for the memorial involved a somewhat local custom. In Hong Kong, guests are often given a white flower to place on the deceased’s coffin during a funeral. Michael was cremated right before Christmas (I’ll share more about that later), so we did not have a coffin there, and chose not to have his ashes present (again, more on that later). The funeral home provided us with a large framed photo of Michael, cropped from a favorite family photo taken by our talented photographer friend Coco. We invited each guest to come forward to place a white rose in front of his photo, to have a private moment of remembrance. On the livestream, viewers spontaneously began putting flower emojis in the chat during this time, and I know my technology-loving husband would have appreciated the gesture. Hong Kong has been home to us for nearly ten years, so I loved being able to incorporate this small nod to our adopted city.

A challenge of this life abroad is missing out on major milestones for friends and family who live in America.

Weddings, baby showers, and even funerals have taken place without our presence. The same has happened in reverse, my sons graduated high school with only their parents in attendance, and my older son’s upcoming university graduation will now have only me. So I know firsthand the difficult feelings bubbling up for everyone who wanted to be with us for Michael’s memorial, but couldn’t make it. I’m grateful to live in the year 2026 where it was so easy to stream the memorial directly to the phones, computers, and televisions of anyone who couldn’t be there in person. Our friend Andrew officiated the memorial, and he was so thoughtful to acknowledge everyone joining us online, especially Michael’s father, his oldest sister Holly, brother Mitchell, and my Dad, who met Michael shortly after I did, 31 years ago. It was a beautiful, memorable, difficult day.

In the late hours following the memorial, after everyone had gone back to their homes, hotels, and Airbnb’s, I watched back the video of what I shared. I cried all over again, then thought of everything I didn’t say, that I could have, should have said. I found myself filled with a sort of regret for not saying enough. It isn’t often that someone hands me a microphone and asks me to speak, and I realized there’s so much more I could have focused on. And then I remembered the most obvious thing I was overlooking: I’m a writer. I have a many places available to me to share more about Michael, including right here on Plucky Day, where you actually signed up to read about Michael and living a courageous life. There are so many people who love to read what I write, and have followed me from platform to platform to do just that. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to share everything I want to say about my Beloved.

Michael is the love of my life, and while I am still alive, I’ll never stop talking about him.

While everyone else has gone back home, Heidi is still here a few more weeks to provide both physical and emotional support as we sort through some of the things in this flat. However, instead of being very productive as I’d hoped, I have managed only to get sick and require much rest. Any exertion causes massive bouts of coughing, and everything hurts. The boys aren’t much better off, having also cycled through visits to the doctor with rounds of antibiotics. Seems about right that after a year of doing everything in our power to remain healthy for Michael, we’re all currently under the weather now that we’ve stopped fighting so hard and have let our guard down.

Below is the program handed out at the memorial. If you’d like a hard copy as a keepsake, please hit reply to this email and send me your mailing address and I’ll pop one in the mail for you.

More soon.