No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing,” the great writer C. S. Lewis once stated.
“We were promised sufferings,” he continued.
“They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination”.
It is perhaps better to refer to others when attempting to define a singular take on the feeling of loss and grief. While almost every single person will encounter personal feelings of their own after the death of a loved one, the feeling of emptiness, suffering, hopelessness and, as Lewis added, “fear” will ring true for almost everyone. Perhaps it is in that final emotion, in fear, that Ringo Starr felt most profoundly after the shocking death of his close friend and former bandmate, John Lennon.
Gunned down by a crazed fan outside his New York home, the actions of Mark David Chapman’s murderous plot are still reverberating today. Lennon was just 40 years of age when he was fatally wounded by Chapman on December 8th, 1980, in the archway of The Dakota, a home he shared with his wife, Yoko Ono. It was a murder that triggered an unprecedented outpouring of grief the world over.
While C. S. Lewis is correct in his assessment of loss and grief on a personal level, what can be appropriated to the feelings of those closest to John Lennon? Those at the height of fame, those who lived fast and shoulder to shoulder with the Beatle, those now dealing with an abhorrent reality of a gruesome and callous murder? “I just wanted to be in a band,” George Harrison famously stated in reaction to Lennon’s death. “Here we are, 20 years later, and some whack job has shot my mate. I just wanted to play guitar in a band,” he added.
While both Harrison and Paul McCartney attempted to put on a unified front.
To show glimpses of their suffering but maintain a level of privacy with their public expression, the Beatles drummer, Ringo Starr, was unravelling in front of the watching world. After rushing to New York to be with Lennon’s family after the murder – the first one to do so – Starr made a gut-wrenching appearance on television to be interviewed by Barbara Walters.
