This is her attempt to make sense of them, starting with the chaos of that terrible December night.
We know the ending.
It happened in New York on Monday, 8 December 1980.
A gusty night, otherwise uncommonly mild for the time of year.
They were confronted by a Texan-born itinerant clutching a Charter Arms .38-caliber pistol and a copy of J.D.
Salinger’sThe Catcher in the Rye.
The twenty-five-year-old, Mark Chapman, had been waiting for them, and calmly fired five bullets at John.
Dr. Lynn has granted many interviews, his recollections ever more embellished.
Lynn also claimed that Yoko lay smashing her head repeatedly on the hospital floor.
Yoko stepped up, too, denying hysterical head-banging.
She insisted that she had remained calm throughout for the sake of their five-year-old son, Sean.
She has supported Dr. Halleran’s version of events.
Why didn’t he pipe up sooner?
At the time I wanted to crawl under a rock, I just wanted to go home.
Were you in America at the time?
Were you among millions more who picked up the newsflash on NBC and CBS?
Might you have been one of the thousands who headed for the Upper West Side to join the vigil?
TV producer Alan Weiss heard it.
If you were born by then and were in England when it happened, you were probably sound asleep.
Brook tore to the Dakota.
He called Radio 4’sTodayprogramme from a sidewalk phone booth.
There was no breakfast TV in those days, most people listened to morning radio.
*
The story has been written, revised and re-imagined ad nauseam.
There are always details that could do with tweaking or ironing.
The greatest stories ever told Tyrannosaurus Rex,Tutankhamun, Caesar, Dickens, Shakespeare can always stand retelling.
No less so the greatest rock star.
It’s about perspective.
We wonder, we review.
There’s always room for new opinion.
Memory, context and tolerance are not static.
I didn’t fancy writing yet another conventional biography of John.
This is not that.
It is a kaleidoscope, a musing, a reflection: who was he, anyway?
How did he feel about this and that?
It is driven by a desire to comprehend his contradictions; to find out when and why he died.
Which is not gratuitous.
We already know that there was more than one John, so who or what killed the original?
Who was the John we came to know, and what does he represent in the twenty-first century?
What might he come to mean beyond?
When we can no longer be bothered with the Where It All Began?
There was obviously music, long before Lennon and McCartney collided.
If that was the reason, music was always the reason.
Few are blessed with the ability to create and express it.
All can appreciate and be moved by it.
Every life is enhanced by this most universal and accessible of art forms.
Even the profoundly deaf feel the rhythms to which every heart beats.
The saving grace is a sonic legacy as vital and magnificent as when he created it.
Tumbling blindly through broken light, I go looking for him.
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