AP timeline details Michael Jackson's last day

That is the hero we remember forever. A year ago, the world watched as Michael Jackson balanced on the edge of a precipice. Behind the once-proclaimed King of Pop was a bleak stretch of pain and artistic decline. Ahead lay a series of 50 London concerts — a high-rolling bid to reassert his musical brilliance and re-establish control of his life.Harsher critics cast him as a man who used wealth and celebrity to elude justice on child molestation charges.Jackson was poised for a great leap of faith, one testing himself and those who believed in him. It was a chance to silence detractors who had mocked his increasingly clownish, artificial appearance and what appeared to be an equally artificial and veiled version of family life with the three children he was raising alone.He was ready. The audience was ready. Then he was gone. Less than three weeks before his new life may have started on a stage filled with special effects and song, the old one ended in a cloud of drugs and unfulfilled dreams.The elaborately staged shows set to begin last July 13 at London's famed O2 Arena represented winner take all, or lose all, for an entertainer who'd been famous for most of his 50 years.Outwardly, Jackson had seemed fit as he prepared for the London shows, and his autopsy found he was in relatively strong physical condition for a man his age.That is still a sad story for us.