Mourners on Tuesday sang and laid flowers on Central Park’s candlelit memorial to John Lennon on the 40th anniversary of his murder in New York City, as his widow Yoko Ono marked the moment with a call for gun control.
“The death of a loved one is a hollowing experience,” said the 87-year-old artist, who still lives in the Manhattan building where her husband was shot.
“After 40 years, Sean, Julian and I still miss him,” she added, before quoting the 1971 song she cowrote with Lennon that became the best-selling single of his solo career. “Imagine all the people living life in peace.”
Photo: AP
Ono, who witnessed her husband’s murder at close range, posted on Twitter an image of the former Beatle’s shattered and bloodied spectacles with the words: “Over 1,436,000 people have been killed by guns in the USA since John Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980.”
At 40 years old, Lennon had returned to songwriting shortly before his death, having taken a five-year hiatus to raise his young son Sean.
The couple was returning home to New York’s famous Dakota building across from Central Park, when disgruntled Beatles fan Mark David Chapman shot Lennon dead.
Lennon was rushed to the emergency room in the backseat of a police patrol car, a harrowing experience detailed in the New York Daily News the next day.
Officers stood in disbelief in the emergency room, it said, as “John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.”
After Lennon’s murder, Ono, who was committed to preserving his memory, funded the construction of the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, which became a site of pilgrimage for fans and mourners.
By the middle of the day on Tuesday, a shrine to the slain singer featuring roses and daisies, photographs and a small holiday tree had cropped up on the “Imagine” mosaic that anchors the memorial in Central Park.
Fans sang and danced as a guitarist strummed tunes including the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood.
Tepper Saffren, who goes by “Sergeant Tepper” and regularly comes to the corner of the park to sing Beatles covers, said that the power of Lennon’s lyrics still ring true today.
“When you play any Beatles song, everybody’s got something that they can tap into,” the 28-year-old said. “And usually it’s a good feeling, or at least a beautiful feeling.”
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