There are moments of grief that arrive not at the expected times — not at the funeral, not in the first hours after the news, not in the formal contexts that society constructs for the purpose of containing loss — but in ordinary situations, ambushed by something specific and small that the general fact of the loss had not prepared you for.
Paul McCartney has spoken about his grief for John Lennon in many interviews across the forty-plus years since Lennon’s death, always with the careful calibration of a man who understands that what he says will be reported and that what he says about Lennon specifically carries a weight that his other public statements do not.
The account he has given most sparingly — the one he has returned to least often and with the most visible difficulty — is not the account of hearing the news, which has been reported in various forms, or the account of the unfinished phone call the night before, which has been discussed previously.
It is the account of what happened in the days following Lennon’s death, when McCartney was driving — somewhere in England, on an ordinary road, at an ordinary time — and a song came on the radio.
The song was Imagine. McCartney has said he heard the opening piano figure and knew immediately what was coming and had approximately five seconds between recognizing the song and being unable to continue driving — not from a conscious decision but from something that happened in his body before his mind had fully processed what his body was responding to.
He pulled over. He has described what followed with the specific brevity of someone who has decided that the adequate description does not exist and that what he can provide is the outline rather than the interior.
He sat on the side of the road in England and listened to Imagine through the car radio and understood, in a way that the general fact of Lennon’s death had not yet fully produced, that the voice he was hearing was a voice he was never going to hear again outside of recordings. That the specific experience of being in a room with John Lennon — of hearing him speak, of hearing him laugh, of hearing the specific quality of his singing voice when it was not being recorded but simply present in a space where both of them were present — was an experience that was permanently over.
The song ended. He sat for a while longer. He drove home.
He has said this story in approximately three interviews across forty years — which, for Paul McCartney, who has given thousands of interviews and who is one of the most practiced and most articulate public communicators in popular music, represents the specific reticence of someone who has decided that this particular story is too close to the actual grief to be told without the telling changing what the grief is.
What he has said most consistently about Lennon’s absence is that the specific loss is not the loss of the partnership — though that loss is real and its effects are visible in everything McCartney has made since 1980 — but the loss of the one person who knew him from the inside rather than from the outside.
Who understood what the work cost and what the work was for and what it felt like to be the person making it, because that person had been in the same position and had made the same work alongside him. The loss of that specific witness is the loss that the side of the road in England is about, and it is a loss that the forty-five years since have not resolved into anything simpler.