Two years ago, Michael Jackson died while my wife and I honeymooned in Kansas City. He moonwalked out of this life the same week we walked down the aisle together to celebrate the sort of bond so often celebrated in pop songs like Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.”

Last year, as our anniversary approached, Gary Coleman died. The Facts of Life star learned about this life’s final fact before Becki and I celebrated learning our first lessons about marriage.

Shortly before June 20th arrived this year, I was prepared to write about how famous black people always seem to die whenever Becki and I celebrate our union. But then another famous black person died around our anniversary, and writing such a post suddenly seemed even more potentially offensive than it already did.

I am not a racist. Neither is my wife. I wrote a heartfelt paper on Martin Luther King, Jr. in Mr. Randall’s 8th grade social studies class, and I admired the man in my heart of hearts. Shortly thereafter, I saw Roots in another class at school, and I wanted shout at the screen, “Don’t worry Kunta Kinte! Someday you’ll host PBS’s beloved children’s program, Reading Rainbow. Then you’ll play Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Your future aboard the U. S. S. Enterprise is so bright you’ve got to wear, well – not shades – but, a metallic banana clip over your eyes to block the brightness!”

Of course, I don’t really have many black friends, but that’s because I live in Kansas, where people are friends with stalks of wheat. I will say this though: 9th Street Baptist Church – a Lawrence-based black church – just fellowshipped with ours last weekend, and its choir nearly blew the doors off of the joint. It was a howling hallelujah that made me wish we could combine our churches permanently.

If you’re wondering who died around our anniversary this year, I’ll get to that – I promise. I just want to circle back and explain a few things. Writers like circles. Cops like donuts, and writers like to do donuts on the parking lot of the printed word.

So this whole business started the second to last day of our honeymoon, when the King of Pop died. I know, I know – you’re inclined to say, “But he was white when he died.” Well, I remember hearing Thriller playing at a friend’s birthday party in 1983 when I was only five. When an artist is black during your childhood, he remains black in your mind forever. Childhood’s visions, after all, remain in the mind like nailed-down furniture that cannot be moved even when life turns upside-down. Adulthood’s sights and sounds, on the other hand, are inclined to float away like untethered helium balloons.

When I saw Michael Jackson in Francis Ford Coppola’s decidedly white 3D sci-fi film Captain EO at Disney’s Epcot Center in 1994, he somehow still seemed black to me. Call me colorblind. Call me stupid. Either way, Michael Jackson died on our honeymoon, and I will never forget that.

I remember when the Challenger crashed; I remember hearing that a body had been found in a room above the garage in Kurt Cobain’s house; and I remember seeing the newsfeed on a TV in a shop window at Crown Center in Kansas City that said, “Michael Jackson is dead.”

(Yes, we honeymooned in Kansas City – that exotic locale that exists a mere 45-minute drive east of us in Missouri. We wanted to honeymoon in a place we could revisit anytime so we could build up a storehouse of memories there over the years – like a grain silo filled with plenty, but filled with memories instead. That memory of reading about Michael Jackson’s death at Crown Center was not exactly what we had in mind.)

Even though I had never been a huge Michael Jackson fan, it felt as though a part of my childhood had died when he passed away. In grade school, my friend Michael Hobbs used to belt out lines from Weird Al’s parody of Jackson’s “Bad” – an ode to obesity titled “Fat” – and I loved it. I had heard “Billie Jean” a million times on the radio as a child, but the lyric had always confused me. As far as I knew, “Billy” was a boy’s name. Therefore, as a child, I thought the song was about a boy named Billie Jean who was not, in fact, Michael Jackson’s son. It might as well have been a song about how my elderly neighbor was not, in fact, my grandmother. But she was, in fact (I like the words “in fact”), my friend Michael Hobbs’s grandmother, and she was neither bad nor fat.

“I think we killed Michael Jackson,” I said to Becki upon seeing the news of Jackson’s death crawl across the bottom of the TV screen at Crown Center. “Our honeymoon is cursed.” This is the kind of magical thinking that sends people to mental wards. But it is also the kind of thinking that leads to unhinged blog posts like this one, so my wife humored me, knowing I would someday write about this. I would say to our friends, “Michael Jackson died while we were on our honeymoon. I think we somehow killed him.”

When Gary Coleman died a year later, I told my wife we’d somehow killed him, too.

“Last year Michael Jackson died,” I said, “and this year Gary Coleman did. This is weird.”

“But neither of them actually died on our anniversary, Chad,” Becki said. “In fact, Gary Coleman died almost an entire month before our anniversary.”

But Becki was silenced this year when E Street Band member Clarence Clemons died – this time on June 18th. Even though I had never connected with Bruce Springsteen’s music on a personal level, I knew Clarence could transform a saxophone into a roaring lion – an untamed beast whose fury could surpass that of any electric guitar.

I knew I would have to wait to write this blog post because it is never funny when someone dies (unless he or she happens to be a clown), and I respected that. For that matter, I’ll admit I was sad when each of these celebrities died. Like so many Americans, I moonwalked to the iTunes store the week Michael Jackson died, and I downloaded my favorite songs by him. When Clarence Clemons died though, I simply mourned for my friends who were E Street Band fans. My sister Alyssa and her husband Paul are obsessive Springsteen fans, and so is my friend, Kansas City-based artist Danny J. Gibson. For years, Danny has owned a small MP3 player that holds only songs by The Boss. He calls it his BossPod, and he regularly listens to it as he walks to work. I knew it would be wrong to make light of Mr. Clemons’s memory.

“First Michael Jackson died,” I said to Becki. “Then Gary Coleman. And now Clarence Clemons. Do we need a lawyer?” I felt like we needed to make a statement to the press – the Lawrence Journal-World, perhaps.

It didn’t help that this year, when we visited Crown Center again as part of our anniversary celebration, we saw a poster for a live version of The Wiz hanging outside the theater there. We had tickets to the American Heartland Theater’s performance of The 39 Steps, based on both the book and the Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name, and suddenly we found ourselves a mere 39 steps away from Michael Jackson again. He had been in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 cinematic version of The Wiz, and this was not lost on me. You see, I was born in 1978, and every math “wiz” knows 39 times two is 78. You don’t have to be a numerologist to see how easily the police could pin the rap on me with regard to Michael Jackson’s death. Crown Center knew we were a couple of honeymoon killers who had a knack for accidentally bumping off black people.

Consider this a public confession. Becki and I are guilty – of loving each other. But we are not racists. And we probably had nothing to do with the deaths of Michael Jackson, Gary Coleman, and Clarence Clemons. Probably. Maybe.

I think of June 20, 2012, and I wonder if this macabre chain will break next year. Beyoncé is pregnant now, after all. Perhaps her baby can wait until our anniversary to enter the world, even if it means cooking in Beyoncé’s oven an extra month or two.