John Lennon's Death:
Why It Still Hurts

Posted 4:07 p.m., Dec. 8, 2005

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From a safe distance of 25 years, perhaps it's OK to say it now. One quarter of a century ago tomorrow, I nearly killed myself.

It was no secret by the end of the day on Dec. 9, 1980--the day after John Lennon's murder--that three people around the country had already made that choice. To a man firmly ensconced in his middle years, certainly, it seems absurd today--killing yourself over the death of a rock star.

But John Lennon wasn't just any rock star. And to an emotionally fragile, 15-year-old boy in the remote wilds of Northern Wisconsin, the existential choice didn't seem so absurd. For that day and numerous others to follow, life itself seemed the absurdity.

It's hard, and more than a little unsettling, to piece together the causes behind that reaction.

It's possible now to listen to Lennon and the Beatles without falling into the crush of a chemical depression. I'm listening to Lennon belting out Chuck Berry's "Rock and Roll Music" right now, and it sounds as vibrant, as happy and slightly off the hinges as ever. It makes me smile, as it always has.

But those dark days are as vivid in my memory as any shivering Lennon performance. It's just that the memory is not nearly so happy.

The News Today (Oh Boy!)

Even by the economically left-behind standards of Northern Wisconsin, my family had it a little rougher than most as the '70s became the '80s. We lived on the edge of the forest on the outskirts of tiny Minong, Wis., sharing space in a cramped trailer house that had been valiantly disguised, by the introduction of a peaked roof and siding, as a real house. It was, in fact, rather like a house of cards.

As the sociologists like to point out in their merrily detached way, poor families suffer difficulties like alcoholism, drug abuse, family violence and crime at rates far out of proportion to their numbers. Mine, let it be said without elaboration, never managed to make itself an exception.

Dec. 8, 1980, as many remember, was a Monday night. A school night. That meant lights out by 10:30 p.m. So I was not among those watching the Monday Night Football telecast that broke the news of John Lennon's murder to the world. However, the TV was on in the next room--learning to sleep with its drone from the living room at night is a trick all trailer-house kids learn.

I was just drifting off to the closing of the nightly news telecast from KBJR-TV in Duluth when one of the anchors broke into the show-ending happy talk to announce that there was a report from New York that Beatle John Lennon had been shot, and taken to an area hospital. There was no word on his condition. Tune in tomorrow morning for more details.

There was no CNN to rush to in those days, no newscast of any kind to look to, to find out what happened. Perhaps the radio might have been able to provide updates, but to turn on the radio after lights out was to face the wrath of my father.

Instead, I lay there, awake. Wondering. Did it really happen? Was he alive? Had he died? Why would someone shoot him? Why? Wasn't he the peace guy? How could it happen?

I slept very little that night, tossing, turning, and worrying, in a way that surprised even me. Did I really care this much about a Beatle? I found myself up and alert at 7 a.m., the point at which the Charles Kuralt morning news show began airing on CBS-TV. I turned on the set to see Kuralt, seated on a stool, alone and silent in the studio before an enormous banner image of John Lennon. He didn't speak at first, and didn't have to. The image itself telegraphed that the death of John Lennon had come. And it had come by violence.

The depression that set in was enveloping and immediate.

Then an odd thing happened. My father awoke, strutting to the kitchen, shirtlessly bloated in his horribly loose-fitting tighty-whiteys. He must have noticed the pallor of my face. "What's wrong with you?" he barked. I could feel the usual argument already starting, but I addressed him honestly. "My hero just got killed, Dad." My glance his way must have been simultaneously defiant and pleading. He seemed a little surprised. "You mean that Beatle guy, that Lennon?"

I nodded, knowing how much he had hated the Beatles and the rest of those "goddamned hippies" for pointing young people toward illegal drugs. But his only reply was, "Oh." He may have thought of worse things to say, but he didn't say them. To my shock, and to my everlasting gratitude, he chose to respect my grief.

John Lennon, I realized, had gotten through even to my leather-tough, honky-tonkin' old man.

Beatles Freak

At some point that day, either during the Kuralt newscast or later on the radio at school, I learned how the hand that savagely blasted bullet holes through Lennon's lean body belonged to someone not terribly unlike myself. Another Beatles freak.

Indeed, I was a Beatles freak, probably to an unhealthy degree. I had a habit of drawing pictures of the lads almost every day, playing their music incessantly, trying to find any reference to them in any publication I might pick up, thinking about them and their music incessantly, reciting their movie joke lines appropos of nothing, the way other nerds sometimes recited gag lines from the Monty Python flicks.

At this distance, that compulsion seems as strange to me as it would to anyone, but I think I understand. The Beatles were the band of "All You Need is Love," the group that could so effortlessly create comforting dreamscapes about fantasy places like Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, the band that could coach a sorrowful boy to "take a sad song and make it better." An optimistic band lighting a bleak age.

To a roughed-up, conflicted kid of 15 who could find little sustenance for the hope that life offered much beyond conflict, anger and failure, the Beatles were a beacon suggesting far greater possibilities. They had come out of nowhere, hailing from a town whose name seems to translate to "piss puddle," and taken over the world's imagination. It wasn't clear how, but it seemed that love had an awful lot to do with that, and if the Beatles weren't clear on how exactly to pull that lever and change the world, they were so assured it could happen that I believed them. I needed to believe them.

At school that cold day of Dec. 9, I was uncharacteristically quiet, and quite probably ashen-faced. No one seemed to take much notice until gym class, when a classmate--I no longer remember who--approached. "What's wrong with you today," she asked. "Is it the John Lennon thing?"

I felt my jaw tighten and my brow-furrows deepen. "No," I whispered, lying. "It's not that." At that moment I felt a peculiar sense that I had committed an act of betrayal, like Peter denying Jesus. Still, I soldiered on to the next lie. "I'm all right."

I was not all right. In fact, I very seriously wanted to die. And the opportunity was there. My father was then already dying from the emphysema that would take him away forever less than five years later. There were more pills lying around in drawers than anyone could account for, most of them highly dangerous, and there was an unopened bottle Yukon Jack in my parents' bedroom. It would have been a very simple matter, and probably painless.

Perhaps it's ironic that it was the Beatles, Lennon himself, who helped steer me through that. The Beatles, that is to say, along with my buddy Matt Peterson, who sat with me through the worst day, Friday, Dec. 12, inviting me to his house in Wascott, Wis., to spend the night and listen to his priceless copy of the White Album--the Talmud among Beatles texts.

As we listened, discussing the music, talking about Lennon and what his life meant, why the Beatles meant so much, I finally let Matt know about this vision of death that had hovered around me for four or five days. Somehow, he talked me back to a slightly more secure footing, and the thoughts from that point faded.

Albert Camus once wrote that there is only one genuine question in all philosophy--the rest are mere brainteasers. For Camus, the single valid question was whether to slog on with living, or to commit suicide.

Never once since those terrible, dark days at the end of 1980 have I have come so close to responding to Camus' question with the wrong answer.

Screwed-up Kid

Now why is that? Say what you will, the Beatles were only a rock band, Lennon merely a musician. He reminded us of that at every turn when he was alive, trying desperately to shake off fandom's leeches. Jerry Garcia, George Harrison, Kurt Cobain, a slew of others have also died. None of their deaths were treated like the death of an Abe Lincoln or John Kennedy. But John Lennon's death was. Why?

I listened today to a series of people on public radio trying to explain their answer to that. For the most part, I couldn't relate to their answers. He was the spokesman for a generation; he had asked us to "Imagine," on and on. (Imagine this: That bloody song is to me the weakest in the entire Lennon canon--a rich man goading us to give up our possessions! Nice!)

I loved John Lennon for another reason entirely. Even before each detail of his life became the stuff of barroom chatter, it was clear to me listening to his music that Lennon and I shared something that--quite fortunately--the majority of people don't get to share. You could hear it clearly, even without enunciation, in the very menace that he brought to a supposedly happy and horny tune like "Dizzy Miss Lizzy," or more directly biographical songs like "Mother" ("Mother, you had me, but I never had you…") or even in the dreamy alienation of "Strawberry Fields Forever." ("No one, I think, is in my tree…")

What Lennon and I shared was that we had both been profoundly screwed-up kids, slapped hard by adult-sized losses and conflicts early in life. (We both also had an adult woman in our lives, his aunt Mimi, my mother, who served as crucial, if imperfect, counterbalances to the desperation.)

But I had an advantage that Lennon did not have. I had him to hold the flashlight and point the way out of Hell.

The miracle of Lennon's life is that he arose from his own personal torment to become a world figure, carrying a message that was very nearly identical to that of Christ. Love each other, Lennon told us. In doing so, he made us love him, and even more miraculously, he made the world love itself just a tiny bit more.

...

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission for artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off.

"I reply, 'The Beatles did.'"

-- Kurt Vonnegut
"Timequake"

...

And for all that, John Lennon got blown away in front of his wife, mowed down like a starving dog on a Nuevo Laredo street.

That's why the newspapers didn't refer at the time to Lennon's murder, but to his "assassination." And that's why, those 25 years ago, it hurt so bad for this trembling, troubled Wisconsin lad to have him cruelly snatched away.

And you know what? That's also why, nearly a quarter century on, it still hurts. It still hurts plenty.

-- Kevin Featherly

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