Yoko Ono: The Night of John Lennon’s Death

Monday, June 11, 2007

Yoko One, widow of John Lennon, cannot escape the tragic death of her former Beatle husband. Yesterday in an interview broadcast on “Desert Island Discs, Yoko Ono, the wife of the late Beatle Singer, John Lennon opened up about the night her husband died. According to her, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York City apartment. She said on that fateful night, Lennon decided he wanted to return home to see his son rather than go out for dinner.

“We were returning from the studio, and I said: ‘Should we go and have dinner before we go home?’ and John was saying, ‘No, let’s go home because I want to see Sean before he goes to sleep.’ And it was like he wasn’t sure if we would get home before he (Sean) went to sleep and he was concerned about that.”

Yoko Ono now 74 made the comment on “Desert Island Discs,” the British Broadcasting Corp. radio program that interviews famous people and plays their favorite songs.

According to Ono, Lennon uttered no dying words when he was shot and killed by deranged fan Mark Chapman outside their Dakota apartment building in Manhattan on Dec. 8, 1980.

Yoko Ono also revealed that she let John make the decision of having Sean or not. According to her, the pregnancy came about after their reunion in 1975 following a two-year separation, and she let Lennon decide whether she should have the baby or abort it.

“I thought that I should let John decide whether to keep it or not. We’d just got back together and I became pregnant very soon, and I didn’t know if it was the right moment to have a child. I just didn’t want to burden him with something he didn’t want,” Ono said.

On Sunday’s show Yoko Ono played Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” (about Sean); “Liverpool Lou,” which was written by Scaffold, a Liverpool group that included Paul McCartney’s brother, and “Magic,” a song composed by Sean Lennon, John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s son.