The Yoko Ono song about the “emptiness” of losing John Lennon
“I miss John Lennon so much,” Elton John once said. “He was a force of nature, and you don’t get many of those. And you sure as hell miss them when they leave.”
When Lennon died, it seemed like the whole world went into mourning. And in a way, it did, particularly across the music industry, when many musicians, peers and otherwise, stopped to admire the one person who changed the landscape, feeling a pain so inconceivable that there weren’t any words. However, no one will ever come close to understanding the pain felt by the one person closest to him: Yoko Ono.
One of the main aspects of grief that Ono had to come to terms with was suddenly having no one to turn to, no longer having that one person she shared every thought and idea with.
She might have learned how to channel grief into art, but if she was ever faced with the choice, it’s a lesson she would have known how to live without, not if it meant having Lennon by her side for the rest of her days. Another aspect that made it excruciatingly difficult was having to accept that Lennon’s passing only adds to the other pain Ono already knew well, and letting the fragments of her life shatter without any sense of bringing it all back together again.
As she reflected to Rolling Stone in 1981, “When John left, it was as if the car we had been driving together was still going full speed… The wheels are still turning, and instead of trying to brake, I have to let them go on spinning for a while.”
Ono poured a lot of her heartbreak into her music. She wrote the heartwrenching ‘I Don’t Know Why’ about the anger she felt towards the entire situation. She also wrote the spine-tingling ‘No, No, No’, which recreates the moment that Lennon got shot and Ono’s immediate reaction. Other songs, like ‘Nobody Sees Me Like You Do’, addressed her frustration with having her person taken away from her, and the uniqueness of the love they shared.
She also wrote ‘Little Boy Blue (Your Daddy’s Gone)’, which she dedicated to their son, Sean, inspired by both the “emptiness” of losing Lennon as well as how Sean continues to carry his spirit. “The song is dedicated to Sean,” she told Rolling Stone in 2013. “John is always with us. Sean and I are always feeling this sort of emptiness somewhere, you know.”
She went on, “But it’s not just emptiness. I think we are still with him, or he’s still with us. The kind of things that I believed in and John believed in, it’s amazing that we got together with the same kind of ideas, exactly the same kind of ideas, and of course, there was some bitterness that we experienced before. But we had the [same] kind of the ideas. The ideas didn’t die when he died, you know. And Sean’s carrying it.”
Like many of Ono’s songs about losing Lennon, the lyrics are heartwrenching. However, there’s also a lot of love and dedication in there, too, and how, as Ono said, it’s not just about the lingering “emptiness” but the beauty of the relationship itself. The pain might be there forever, but there’s also the privilege of having come together in the first place, even if their time was cut short.
