The private funeral that followed drew more than 500 attendees from the music industry and Gaye’s personal life. Smokey Robinson was there—Robinson, who had known Gaye since the early 1960s at Motown, who had watched him grow from a nervous young drummer into one of the most important artists in American music, who had been his friend through the fights with Gordy and the breakdowns and the comebacks and all of it. Dick Gregory was there.
Stevie Wonder, who had been a Motown colleague and friend, performed a song he had written specifically for the occasion: “Lighting Up the Candles.” The gesture—composing something new, rather than performing something Gaye had recorded—was itself a form of tribute. A gift.
Gaye’s body was cremated. Anna Gordy Gaye and his three children later took his ashes to the Pacific Ocean and scattered them over the water.
He had come from the East Coast—from Washington, D.C., from the Southwest Waterfront, from a family that had settled in the nation’s capital after migrating from Kentucky. He had spent his adult life in the Midwest—Detroit—and then in Los Angeles and then briefly in Europe and then in Los Angeles again.
His ashes ended in the Pacific.
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WHAT “SEXUAL HEALING” WAS REALLY ABOUT
It is worth taking a moment to consider what “Sexual Healing” was actually saying—because the song is often reduced to its most literal surface meaning, and there is significantly more going on beneath it.
Gaye himself, in interviews he gave following the single’s release, spoke about healing in the broadest sense. He had been profoundly broken during the years leading up to Belgium—financially, emotionally, spiritually broken in ways that conventional language didn’t quite capture. What he had found in Ostend—the exercise, the sea air, the reduced drug use, the church attendance, the regular sleep—was a kind of physical reconnection to his own body that he described in terms of healing.