On June 25, 2009, when I was 8 years old, Michael Jackson died. My young brain was quite puzzled at the extreme grief I saw everywhere. I asked my mom why people seemed so nostalgic about the little black boy from The Jackson 5 despite knowing he’d strayed so far away from that image; in my mind, he was living a vastly different life—like bleaching his skin and undergoing extensive plastic surgery—at the time of his death. Additionally, his level of fame had greatly decreased as a result of his involvement in public scandals. Yet once he passed away, it was as if everyone’s former misgivings were immediately erased.

My mom posted my musings on Facebook because, like all parents, she wanted to show her friends how brilliant her 8-year-old was. But these musings were actually the first of an idea that would puzzle me for years to come: Why does death make people idealize public figures they’d formally forgotten or considered problematic while they were living?

I’ve seen many examples of people, both fictional and real, who are noticeably problematic, harmful or simply ignored and dismissed in life, but when they pass away, they are mourned as if they never did anything wrong. People remember past accomplishments but forget the person’s shortcomings. Alternatively, they forget how much they dismissed the person while they were alive.

A particularly stunning example comes in Hanif Abdurraqib’s “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us,” in which he talks about how white liberals tend to dismiss the injustices that African-Americans face in daily life, but once these injustices result in death, they’re suddenly very vocal. Abdurraqib makes the observation that bodies almost seem more valuable in death than in life.

I’ve pondered this arc for a long time, and I think a person’s death produces a sort of urgency and vulnerability that most people aren’t comfortable with in life. It’s an example of the phrase “you never know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” in its most extreme sense.

Theoretically, we all know that it’s important to tell people how we feel about them before it’s too late. But even though we logically know that life does eventually end, I don’t think many people realize that there will come a day—one we can never predict—where it is literally too late to confess our feelings to those in our lives that they apply to. To compensate for this, I think we tend to glorify lost ones to a degree that perhaps they shouldn’t be given.

Death is such a permanent ending that it makes people want to express their feelings for someone even if they know it’s too late. Maybe the intended audience will never hear it, but I think in that situation, even just verbalizing your feelings can be kind of cathartic.

That being said, I do think people still need to be held accountable in the midst of tragedy. Yes, very, very sad things do happen, but that doesn’t excuse one’s erroneous deeds. If someone does something problematic, it needs to be addressed; harmful actions don’t just go away when something catastrophic happens. I think it is important to be able to address someone’s lesser qualities while also mourning their admirable ones. Even in our grief, we can’t think of a person’s personality and character traits as monolithic entities.

Who knows, maybe I’ll keep contemplating this idea for years to come. I don’t know all of the answers, and perhaps I never will. But I do know that it’s important to hold each other close, and we should really tell people how we feel before we can’t do so anymore. We should also acknowledge people’s potentially harmful actions, because there are wrongs that shouldn’t be casually dismissed.