A Personal Look at Lennon 40 Years After His Senseless Death

It's crazy how time flies, it really is. When I was a kid, I used to ask my father how it was and how did the world react to Kennedy's assassination in November of 1963. I wasn't born until almost two years later in September of 1965 when The Beatles "Yesterday" was on top of the Billboard charts. At least I can say that. So at 15 years old, I was already a Beatles fan when the events of December 8, 1980 happened that night, a night that changed my youth, my important teenage period. Like the folks who remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, I had my moment that night when a deranged man from Hawaii traveled to New York City for one purpose, the shoot John Lennon. That he did.

Lennon, 40, who was 15 years younger than I am today, did more in those 40 years than anyone could have. The former Beatle, artist, writer, actor and peace activist had just spent a solid five years at home in the Dakota with his wife, Yoko Ono, and his second son Sean being a "house husband", a father that, I feel, he always wanted to be for his first son Julian, regrets that he didn't embrace back in the 1960s when life to Lennon were... the Beatles. After the Beatles mega success, John had his own success as a solo artist right off the bat with his first album, "Plastic Ono Band", then "Imagine", "Mind Games", "Walls and Bridges", "Rock and Roll", later "Double Fantasy" and posthumously, "Milk and Honey" and more.

In November 1980, the excitement of new John Lennon music was overwhelming, I remember. When the first single, "(Just Like) Starting Over" came out as a single, nothing stopped me by running to the nearest record story to purchase the single. Ah there it was. I was definitely going to buy the album, but I needed to play this on my turntable as soon as I got back to my room in suburban New York. Oh the happiness and the joy! My sister Jill, three years my youth, grew up loving music like I did so we had that very special bond among others. I was into the Beatles, Stones, Led Zeppelin and the Who, she loved Springsteen, Bill Joel, and later Duran Duran, so that summer of 1980, I bought her "Glass Houses" the new album by Billy Joel for her birthday and later for the holidays, her gift to me was "Double Fantasy". Little did we know that album would fly off the record store shelves after December 8th.

Later in the '90s, for the Beatles "Anthology" project, it warmed my heart that the three surviving Beatles recorded John's "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love", a glimpse and a taste of witnessing new Beatles music, something I was way too young to be familiar with back in the '60s, unless when I was watching "Sesame Street" and a Beatles song popped on. Recounts I remember faintly as that educational show introduced me to "Yellow Submarine" and "Octopus's Garden". Flash forward to 2005, as a public relations professional, I was privileged to promote Dr. Stephen Lynn, the once Director of Emergency Medicine from Roosevelt Hospital (now known as Mt. Sinai West), so he can tell his story of how he and his ER team tried to save John's life that night 25 years ago. Having Dr. Lynn tell his story over and over again, I feel, I kept John's memory alive.

So here we are, December 2020, 40 years after that awful night and horrible time when we were all sad to first hear of John Lennon's death, the shock and sadness was like an open wound and we, the fans, were bleeding with sadness and asking why? I needed to be at Strawberry Fields in Central Park this year, only twenty minutes from my Bronx office, to be with other Beatles and Lennon fans. Wearing my Beatles face mask, some of the folks there asked me where I got the mask and I kindly told them that you can get anything online these days. At the memorial, some sang songs and danced, but I was quite content to observe what was going on and briefly speaking to some. Just good people celebrating Lennon's life, most wearing masks. Then one film student from Columbia University who was with her father, wanted to interview me. I replied "no problem" and the first question she asked me, "where was I when I first heard the news of John Lennon being shot?", I thought at that moment, the circle is complete. It's crazy how time flies.