The song that soothed Yoko Ono after John Lennon’s death: “I didn’t want people to take it from me”
When a celebrity dies, large portions of the world fall into mourning. However, in the parasocial element of people’s connections to their favourite artist, the fact that they’re a real, genuine human with family and friends and a normal life under the fame can get lost.
When they die, their deaths can become a thing for public consumption as the masses forget that, at the core, there is real grief felt by real people for one of their loved ones, like Yoko Ono, who was simply grieving her husband.
After the shocking assassination of John Lennon, the world completely spiralled, and it is understandable, given how completely unexpected and senseless his death was, taking away one of the most famous artists the world had ever known in such a violent and cruel way, and while everyone fell into a state of disbelief, they seemed to lose their manners.
Yoko Ono was never any stranger to mistreatment due to her role as Lennon’s wife. From the second the couple met, she was hounded day after day by the press and fans. They tore apart her appearance, her accent, her family situation, and her work. They blamed her for the split of the band; they claimed she’d set Lennon off course and ruined his life. It was unending and obviously distressing.
Now imagine that, but while in an intense, devastating state of complete and all-consuming grief. After the death of her husband, the treatment of Ono still didn’t let up.
Instead, it followed her home as people would call their apartment at the Dakota constantly to play cruel pranks on the widow, claiming to have sent bombs to her home or, in some cases, pretending to be the reincarnated soul of her husband in the body of someone else.
She was tormented in those days and weeks following the death, but one thing provided comfort. At all times, she carried a cassette of ‘Grow Old With Me’, one of the last demo songs Lennon recorded before his death. It was a scrappy recording, captured at home and holding really only an idea of a song, but to Ono, it was a piece of her husband that she clung to throughout the worst days.
“After his passing, all I had was a cassette of it. I had it in my handbag,” she said. It was so important to her that she was truly guarding it with her life, adding, “When I went to sleep, I had some bells on my door, so if anyone came in, I’d hear it. I didn’t want people to take it from me.”
It’s a bittersweet tune. “Spending our lives together / Man and wife together / World without end,” Lennon sings on the love song that begins, “Grow old along with me / The best is yet to be.” Now facing up to a life where she wouldn’t be able to grow old alongside her love, Ono held this recording close to soothe herself as she navigated the unthinkable.
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