Saudadè

Michael Joseph Phelan

March 26, 1998 ~ June 5, 2024

Michael Phelan was born on March 26, 1998 in Tippecanoe, Indiana. He died on June 5, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. He was twenty six years old.

Michael Phelan was the smartest person I’ve ever known, hands down. He was also hilarious. He had an eidetic memory and used it to build a mind that could hold Lacan, tomes worth of world and war history and Ginsberg alongside Gucci Mane records (Off the Leash being a favorite of his) and Dogon astronomy and the precise coordinates of every conversation he’d ever had that mattered. He was an academic team captain and a producer. He was six feet ten inches tall and warmer than anyone that large has any right to be.

He loved music with the devotion of someone who understood music not only as a love but a lifeline. He loved ideas the same way. He had impeccable political instincts. He met people where they actually were rather than where it was convenient for them to be, and the people who were lucky enough to be met that way never forgot it.

He was capable of truly extraordinary tenderness.
He struggled for years with things that were done to him before he had language for them, and he carried that struggle with more grace and more humor than it deserved. He was not his struggle. He was the person underneath it: beautiful, brilliant, funny, warm, and genuinely, completely alive in the presence of people he trusted.

He is survived by myself, his parents, and his sister.

He is remembered by everyone who ever had a real conversation with him, which is to say, everyone who knew him at all.

He deserved more time.

If you had let Michael tell it, this was our song.