John Lennon Asked Paul McCartney a Heartbreaking Question Shortly Before His Mother Died

Both Paul McCartney and John Lennon dealt with the premature death of their mothers when they were teenagers. McCartney’s mother died in 1956, and two years later, Lennon’s mother died. Before Lennon’s mother Julia died, he had been growing close with her. He asked McCartney how he could bear living without his mother.

The bassist’s mother died when he was a teenager

McCartney’s mother, Mary, was diagnosed with cancer and died following complications during surgery. She is often a muse for him in his songwriting, but he expressed his sadness that he has difficulty remembering her clearly.

“At night when she came home [from work], she would cook, so we didn’t have a lot of time with each other,” McCartney said, per the Telegraph. “But she was just a very comforting presence in my life. And when she died, one of the difficulties I had, as the years went by, was that I couldn’t recall her face so easily. That’s how it is for everyone, I think. As each day goes by, you just can’t bring their face into your mind, you have to use photographs and reminders like that.”

John Lennon asked Paul McCartney how he could handle his mother’s death

Months before Julia Lennon died, George Harrison’s mother, Louise, overheard a conversation between Lennon and McCartney.

“It was several months before John’s mother died and he was just getting really close to her,” Louise said per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “I overheard him say to Paul, ‘I don’t know how you can sit there and act normal with your mother dead. If anything like that happened to me, I’d go off me head.'”

Not long after, a car struck and killed Julia. Lennon retreated into himself and refused to talk about the loss with his friends.

“When John’s mother did die, he didn’t seem to go off his head, but he wouldn’t come out,” Louise said. 

While he was hesitant to talk about her, Lennon did write music about his late mother.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney bonded over their mothers

Years later, McCartney and Lennon discussed their mothers while stuck in Florida during a storm.

“I seem to remember we had some time off in Key West, Florida, and it was because there was a hurricane, and we’d been diverted, I think, from Jacksonville,” McCartney told NPR in 2001. “So we had to spend a night or two in Key West, is where we ended up, anyway. And at that age, with that much time on our hands, we really didn’t know what to do with it except get drunk. And so that was what we did.”

McCartney admitted that this was an “emotional landmark” for them because they both wept. 

“Probably our mothers dying, because John and I shared that experience. My mother died when I was about 14, and his died shortly after — about a year or so after, I think,” McCartney said. “So this was a great bond John and I always had. We both knew the pain of it, and we both knew that we had to put on a brave face because we were sort of teenage guys, and you didn’t talk about that kind of thing where we came from.”