DEATH is a terrible thing and shouldn’t really happen to anybody but it does because, quite frankly, it’d be chaos if it didn’t.

Road congestion is already bad enough, but could you imagine battling with all of humanity from the last million years for a parking space outside work?

Or bumping into Hitler while he holidays in the Lake District, what would you say?

Fortunately for the majority of us, death is final.

But for a celebrity, death can be the beginning of a long and fruitful career.

Heath Ledger may have died, but we’re still seeing him in movies and obviously giving him awards.

However, for a legend (sorry, Heath, you were brilliant but legend’s a bit strong), death is very much a warm-up to when things really start to take off career-wise.

Of course I’m talking about Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. And the most recent victim of life’s inevitable finale, Michael Jackson – but legends don’t go quietly like the rest of us.

Firstly, there’s the shock announcement: Michael Jackson dies of heart attack.

What was unusual was people were genuinely shocked, despite the frailty of the man. He was too popular and rich to die, surely.

And then we progressed to stage two of the celebrity death far quicker than normal.

Maybe it’s because people had been saving up the jokes over the years, but it was only an hour after his death when I heard my first bad -taste joke about Michael’s “hobbies”.

Speed was certainly of the essence in this celebrity death because this is the age of the internet, the rolling news channel and greedy relatives.

Crucially, it was also the death of an American legend and the Yanks don’t waste any time when it comes to media announcements. As a result, we were now already into stage three: the autopsy. Had there been foul play?

There’d be more to come on that later but for now we would have to content ourselves with the assertion that “no, there hadn’t, but we just can't wait for the toxicology report, folks”.

Unfortunately, the “what’s happened to the millions of dollars” stage wasn’t far off.

And who better to kick it all off than Michael’s very own father.

He wanted to know what was in the will, where the cash was and who was getting what – and what caring parent wouldn’t want to know that less than 24 hours after their son’s death?

It was time to take a break now for a day or two, but any real legend deserves a good old-fashioned memorial service broadcast live to millions of people across the world, fronted by their own family with a star performance by their devastated daughter – and Mariah Carey.

By now we were over the sadness, so it was decided we were ready for the revelations stage.

First up, they might not even be his children, secondly, Joe Jackson wasn’t getting a penny, thirdly, he had a boyfriend? There’s a lot more, but I only get 550 words for this column.

And now we’re firmly into the conspiracy stage as we ask: “Who’s to blame?”

The final stage is yet to come, but it can only be a matter of days before the age-old: "I saw Michael shopping for groceries in the supermarket" story.

This signals the end of the celebrity death grieving process as we no longer have to; the media has now reincarnated them.