The Last Day in the Life

COVER STORY

John Lennon is shot to death at 40, and a bright dream fades

Just a voice out of the American night. “Mr. Lennon.” He started to turn around. There is no knowing whether John Lennon saw, for what would have been the second time that day, the young man in the black raincoat stepping out of the shadows. The first shot hit him that fast, through the chest. There were at least three others.

Not that night, or the next day, but a little later, after the terror ebbed and the grief could be managed, Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, took their five-year-old son Sean to the spot in the apartment courtyard where she had seen his father murdered. She had already shown Sean a newspaper with his father’s picture on the front page. She tried to do what everyone else has done since that Monday night. She tried to explain.

Like everyone else, too, the boy asked simple questions to which there would never be simple or satisfactory answers. If, as was being said, the man liked his father so much, why did he shoot him? His mother explained: “He was probably a confused person.” Not good enough. Better to know, Sean Lennon said, if he was confused or really meant to kill. His mother said that was up to the courts to decide, and Sean wanted to know which courts she was talking about: tennis or basketball? Then Sean cried, and he also said, “Now Daddy is part of God. I guess when you die you become much more bigger because you’re part of everything.”

Sean did not really know or understand about the Beatles, or what his father was to the world. But Sean will surely know, soon enough, that his father did not have to die to become part of everything. Given the special burden and grace of his great gift, he already was. Not just for his wife or son but for more people than anyone could ever begin to number, the killing of John Lennon was a death in the family.

For all the official records, the death would be called murder. For everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the Beatles—which is to say, for much of an entire generation that is passing, as Lennon was, at age 40, into middle age, and coming suddenly up against its own mortality—the murder was something else. It was an assassination, a ritual slaying of something that could hardly be named. Hope, perhaps; or idealism. Or time. Not only lost, but suddenly dislocated, fractured.

The outpouring of grief, wonder and shared devastation that followed Lennon’s death had the same breadth and intensity as the reaction to the killing of a world figure: some bold and popular politician, like John or Robert Kennedy, or a spiritual leader, like Martin Luther King Jr. But Lennon was a creature of poetic political metaphor, and his spiritual consciousness was directed inward, as a way of nurturing and widening his creative force. That was what made the impact, and the difference—the shock of his imagination, the penetrating and pervasive traces of his genius—and it was the loss of all that, in so abrupt and awful a way, that was mourned last week, all over the world. The last Day in the Life, “I read the news today, oh boy …”

Sorrow was expressed, sympathies extended by everyone from Presidents and Presidents-elect, Prime Ministers and Governors and mayors to hundreds of fans who gathered at the arched entryway to the Lennons’ Manhattan apartment building, the Dakota, crying and praying, singing and decorating the tall iron gates with wreaths and single flowers and memorial banners. CHRISTMAS IN HEAVEN, read one. Another recalled the magical invocation of a childhood memory that became one of his finest songs: Strawberry Fields Forever.

Ringo Starr flew to New York to see Yoko. George Harrison, “shattered and stunned,” went into retreat at his home in Oxfordshire, England. Paul McCartney, whom Lennon plainly loved and just as plainly hated like the brother he never had, said, “I can’t tell you how much it hurts to lose him. His death is a bitter, cruel blow—I really loved the guy.”

Having no wish to contribute to the hysteria that always follows the grief at such public mournings, McCartney, who has hired two bodyguards to protect himself and his family, said he would stay home in Sussex, England, even if there was a funeral. There was not. Lennon’s body was cremated in a suburban New York cemetery, and Ono issued a statement inviting everyone “to participate from wherever you are” in a ten-minute silent vigil on Sunday afternoon.

Before that, it had been a week of tributes. Radio stations from New Orleans to Boston cleared the air waves for Lennon and Beatles retrospectives. In Los Angeles, more than 2,000 people joined in a candlelight vigil at Century City; in Washington, D.C., several hundred crowded the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in a “silent tribute” that recalled the sit-ins of the ’60s. Record stores all over the country reported sellouts on the new Lennon-Ono album, Double Fantasy, their first record in five years, as well as the back stock of Lennon’s previous records.

Some reaction was tragic. A teen-age girl in Florida and a man of 30 in Utah killed themselves, leaving notes that spoke of depression over Lennon’s death. On Thursday, Ono said, “This is not the end of an era. The ’80s are still going to be a beautiful time, and John believed in it.”

All the brutal and finally confounding facts of the killing were examined like runes and held up to the light like talismans, small shards of some awful psychic puzzle. A pudgy Georgia-born ex-security guard from Hawaii named Mark David Chapman fired his shots at Lennon from what the police call “combat stance”: in a stiff crouch, one hand wrapped around the butt of his newly purchased revolver, the other around his wrist to steady it. As Lennon took six staggering steps, Chapman, 25, simply stood still, and then went with the arresting officers like a model citizen who had been unfairly rousted on a traffic bust. Chapman’s personal history showed, in retrospect, many ominous byways (see following story), but immediately after the shooting, he offered no explanations. And no regrets.

Chapman arrived in New York three days before the killing, checked into a Y.M.C.A. nine blocks from Lennon’s apartment, and started hanging out in front of the building, waiting for Lennon like any other fan. There were usually fans at the gates of the Dakota, a grand, gloomy, high-maintenance Gothic fortress overlooking the west side of Central Park, because the building houses several celebrities: Lauren Bacall, Roberta Flack, Leonard Bernstein. Fans of the Beatles and Lennon lovers accounted for conversation with Chapman outside the Dakota. Said one, “He just seemed like a really nice, genuine, honest person who was there because he admired John.” Others, like WPLJ Disc Jockey Carol Miller, who lives near the Dakota, had noticed Chapman and thought “he looked strange. He was older than the kids who hung around there.” When Miller first heard that Lennon had been shot, Chapman’s face flashed in her mind.

On Saturday night, Chapman hailed a cab and told Driver Mark Snyder to take him to Greenwich Village. On the way he boasted that he had just dropped off the tapes of an album John Lennon and Paul McCartney made that day. He said that he was the recording engineer and that they had played for three hours.

On Monday afternoon Chapman spotted Lennon and asked him to autograph an album. Lennon hastily scribbled his name and climbed into a waiting car to take him to a recording studio. Did Chapman feel slighted by Lennon? Possibly. But the night before he had suddenly checked out of the Y and moved into the cushier Sheraton Center hotel and bought himself a big meal. It was as if he were rewarding himself in advance for some proud accomplishment. Now on Monday, only hours after getting Lennon’s autograph, Chapman was waiting again, this time in the shadows of the entryway with a gun. When the police grabbed him after the shooting, they found he still had the autographed album with him. He also had a paperback copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Lennon was no stranger to threats on his life. As early as 1964, at the first Beatles concert in France, Lennon got a note backstage that read, “I am going to shoot you at 9 tonight.” He had only lately become accustomed to the freewheeling anarchy of New York street life: “I can go out this door now and go into a restaurant . . . Do you want to know how great that is?” he told the BBC. But friends remember him as being guarded both in public and around the few people he and Ono met during the long years of self-willed isolation that were only ending with the completion of the new album. “John was always wary,” says his friend, Actor Peter Boyle. “Maybe partly because he was extraordinarily tuned in. He’d pick up on people, and they’d pick up on him.”

Lennon also shared with many other rockers a kind of operational fatalism, a sense that doing your best, whether on record or in concert, required laying yourself open, making yourself vulnerable. It was not only the pressures and excesses of the rock-‘n’-roll life that moved the Who’s Pete Townshend to remark, “Rock is going to kill me somehow.” And it was not just the death of Elvis Presley that Lennon had in mind when he said to friends in 1978, “If you stay in this business long enough, it’ll get you.”

Rock, Lennon knew as well as anyone, is the applied art of big risk and big feelings. The songs he and Paul McCartney wrote for the Beatles, separately and together, brought more people up against the joy and boldness of rock music than anything else ever has. It wasn’t just that Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein were taking the Beatles as seriously—and a good deal more affectionately—than Stockhausen. The worldwide appeal of the Beatles had to do with their perceived innocence, their restless idealism that stayed a step or two ahead of the times and once in a while turned, bowed low, gave the times a razz and dared them to catch up. The slow songs were heart stoppers, the fast ones adrenaline rushes of wit, low-down love and high, fabulous adventure. The songs became, all together, an orchestration of a generation’s best hopes and fondest dreams.

The songs Lennon wrote later on his own—Imagine and Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, Instant Karma and Give Peace a Chance and the gentle and unapologetic Watching the Wheels from the new album, or the gorgeous seasonal anthem, Happy Xmas (War Is Over), which he recorded with Ono in 1972—kept the standard high and his conscience fine-tuned. The political songs were all personal, the intimate songs all singular in their fierce insistence on making public all issues of the heart, on working some common moral out of private pain. Rock music is still benefitting from lessons that Lennon fought hard for, then passed along. All his music seemed to be torn from that small, stormy interior where, as Robert Frost once wrote, “work is play for mortal stakes.”

Despite the universality of interest in his death, Lennon remained chiefly the property—one might even be tempted to say prisoner—of his own generation. Some —those who regarded the Beatles as a benign cultural curiosity, and Lennon as some overmoneyed songwriter with a penchant for political pronouncements and personal excess—wondered what all the fuss was about and could not quite understand why some of the junior staff at the office would suddenly break into tears in the middle of the day. “A garden-variety Nobel prizewinner would not get this kind of treatment,” said a teacher in Oxford, England. Across the Atlantic, in schools and on college campuses, those from other generations showed almost as great a sense of puzzlement, even distance, as of loss. Gretchen Steininger, 16, a junior at Evergreen Park High School in suburban Chicago, said, “I recognize the end of an era—my mom’s.”

So a little reminder was in order, a small history lesson, and there was no one better to lead the class than Bruce Springsteen. Lennon had lately become warmly admiring of Springsteen, especially his hit single Hungry Heart. Springsteen could probably have let Lennon’s death pass unremarked, and few in the audience at his Philadelphia concert last Tuesday would have been troubled. But instead of ripping right into the first song, Springsteen simply said, “If it wasn’t for John Lennon, a lot of us would be some place much different tonight. It’s a hard world that asks you to live with a lot of things that are unlivable. And it’s hard to come out here and play tonight, but there’s nothing else to do.”

Then Bruce and the E Street Band tore into Springsteen’s own anthem, Born to Run, making it clear that playing was the best thing to do. Guitarist Steve Van Zandt let the tears roll down his face, and Organist Danny Federici hit the board so hard he broke a key. By the second verse, the song turned into a challenge the audience was happy to accept: “I wanna know love is wild, I wanna know love is real,” Springsteen yelled and they yelled back. By the end, it sounded like redemption John Lennon knew that sound too. He could use it like a chord change because he had been chasing it most of his life.

John Lennon grew up on Penny Lane, and after a time he moved to a house outside Liverpool, hard by a boys’ reformatory. There was another house in the neighborhood where John and his pals would go to a party and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. The house was called Strawberry Fields. His boyhood was neither as roughly working-class as early Beatles p.r. indicated, nor quite as benign as the magical association of those place names might suggest. But John’s adolescence in the suburbs, the garden outside the back door and the warm ministrations of his Auntie Mimi did not diminish either the pain or the sense of separateness that was already stirring.

His father, a seaman named Alfred, left home shortly after John was born, and his mother Julia sent him to her sister Mimi because, it was said, she could not support her child. John was 4½ when he was farmed out to the suburbs All the sorrow, rage and confusion of this early boyhood were taken up again and again in songs like Julia and Mother. These early years were not an unhealed wound for Lennon, but more nearly a root, a deep psychic wellspring from which he could draw reserves of hard truth.

Reserves of another sort gave him trouble even early on. “In one way, I was always hip,” Lennon remarked recently in Playboy, during an interview that could stand as lively proof that some of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life. “I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see. I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way.” Lennon’s songs made peace with those hallucinations and expanded them —whether with psychedelics, psyschiatry or a sort of domestic mysticism—while keeping them always within reach, as a man might keep a flashlight on a nightstand in case he had to get up in the dark Lennon was already well into his teens, living 15 minutes away from his mother but seldom seeing her, when rock ‘n’ roll grabbed hold of him and never let loose. All the raw glories of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis shook him to his shoes. He responded with the rowdiness of spirit and emotional restlessness that already set him apart from his peers and caused their parents concern. Paul McCartney’s father warned his son to steer clear of John, which amounted to an open if inadvertent invitation to friendship.

By his 16th year, John had formed his first band, the Quarrymen, and Paul McCartney had enlisted as guitar player. John and Paul began to write songs together almost as soon as they had finished tuning up, and they played any gig the band could get. By the end of 1956, though he had his first group and a best friend, Lennon suffered a lasting wound His mother was killed in an accident while she stood waiting for a bus. As he said, “I lost her twice.”

Two years later, George Harrison had joined the Quarrymen, and the band was actually earning some money They had their own fans, and a growing reputation that took them to club dates in the gritty seaport of Hamburg, West Germany, where they eventually changed their name to the Beatles and got a double dose of the seamier side of rock life Lennon, who like the rest of the boys favored black leather jackets, pegged pants and stomper boots, was sending long and passionate mash notes back home to Cynthia Powell. “Sexiest letters this side of Henry Miller,” he observed.

He was also a student at the Liverpool College of Art while the Quarrymen were still gigging around. “I knew John would always be a bohemian,” Aunt Mimi recalled. “But I wanted him to have some sort of job. Here he was nearly 21 years old, touting round stupid halls for £3 a night. Where was the point in that?”

Well, the point was the music, a peak-velocity transplant ot American rock, with its original blistering spirit not only restored but exalted. There was some concern for the future, however. A Liverpool record-store owner named Brian Epstein thought he might be able to lend a hand there. He signed on as the group’s manager in 1961. By the end of the following year. boys got their first record contract and their first producer, George Martin, who remained aboard for the crazy cruise that came to be called Beatlemania. There was one final change of personnel: Drummer Pete Best was replaced by a gentleman named Richard Starkey, who favored quantities of heavy jewelry, most of it worn on the digits, and who went by the name of Ringo Starr.

It took just a month for the second Beatles single, Please Please Me, to reach the top of the English charts. That was in January of 1963. By the end of that year, they had released She Loves You and appeared live on a BBC variety show in front of thousands of screaming fans in the audience and unverifiable millions of new converts and dazed parents sitting at home in front of the telly. I Want to Hold Your Hand came out in the U.S. in the first week of 1964, and it seemed then for a while that both sides of the Atlantic were up for grabs. Beatles forever.

Some history becomes myth, some myth goes down in history, some statistics boggle the mind: the Beatles have sold, all over the world, upwards of 200 million records. They made history so quickly, and so seismically, that their chronology can be given like a code, or an association game in which words, phrases, snatches of lyrics, names, can stand for whole years. Even the skeptical on either side of the Beatles generation will be startled to see how easily they can play along. Start off with an easy one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you’re off . . . Ed Sullivan. Jelly babies. Plaza Hotel. Moptops. Arthur and A Hard Day’s Night. The Maharishi and M.B.E.s. Sergeant Pepper. LSD. Apple. “More popular than Jesus.” Shea Stadium. White Album. Yesterday. I’d love to turn you on.” Jane, Patti, Cynthia. Linda. Yoko. “Paul is dead.” Abbey Road. Let It Be.

The history and the resonance of those fragments are so strong that even out of chronological sequence they form their own associations, like a Joseph Cornell collage. Some of the colors may be psychedelic, but the shadings are the pastel of memory, the patina made of remembered melody. Lennon, the only wedded Beatle —he had married Cynthia in 1962 and had a son, Julian—had early been typed as the most restless, outspoken and creative of the group, even though he led, outwardly, the most settled life. There was paradox in this popular portrait, just as there was considerable tension in Lennon’s belief that the well-noted contradictions were true. There were both beauty and ambition in his music, and a full measure of turmoil too. He was experimenting with drugs and working up some of the material that would eventually find its way into Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when he walked into a London gallery in 1966 and there, among ladders, spyglasses, nail boards, banners and other props of her art, met Yoko Ono.

The daughter of a well-to-do Japanese banker, Ono, now 47 was born in Tokyo. She had lived in San Francisco before World War II, foraged for food back home during it, and afterward returned to the States, where she attended Sarah Lawrence College and became interested in the far-flung reaches of the avantgarde. Her first husband was a Japanese musician. The marriage so offended Ono’s mother that she never reconciled with her daughter. She worked on concerts for John Cage, became associated with other artists such as La Monte Young and Charlotte Moorman, the topless cellist whose staging of and participation in art “events” came a little later to be called happenings. Ono married again, a conceptual artist named Tony Cox, and they had a daughter, Kyoko. Ono once brought the baby onstage during a concert as “an uncontrollable instrument.” Eventually, Cox and Kyoko went to Japan, and Ono to England. Her artworks, or happenings, began to show a sense of humor that was both self-mocking and affirmative, and when John Lennon climbed a ladder to look through a telescope at that London gallery, what he saw was no distant landscape but a simple YES.

The other Beatles were not delighted to have Ono around. Besides whatever personal antagonisms or random jealousies might have existed, one suspects now, Paul, George and Ringo may have considered her dedicated avant-gardism somewhat inimical to the best popular instincts of their music. For her part, she felt she was under heavy surveillance. “I sort of went to bed with this guy that I liked and suddenly the next morning I see these three in-laws standing there,” she recalled recently. John, separated from Cynthia, fell in love with Yoko and her ideas. Some of her conceptual art had the same intellectual playfulness as his lyrics, and Lennon became a collaborator in many of her projects. They made films—of flies crawling, of dozens of bare bums. They made records, including the notorious Two Virgins, for which they posed naked, front and back. Shock! Scandal! Grim predictions for the future!

In fact, there was already a fair amount of dissension among the members of the band: McCartney wanted to get out more and play for the folks, Lennon wanted to work in the recording studio, like an artist with a canvas. The ideological pressures and upheavals of the decade made the four Beatles stand out in even sharper contrast to each other. John became much more political, George more spiritual, Paul seemingly more larky, and Ringo more social. In the more than two years between Sergeant Pepper and Abbey Road, Lennon and McCartney wrote, separately and still (but more tenuously) together, some of their greatest songs (Penny Lane, All You Need Is Love, and Strawberry Fields Forever). But if the turmoil had an immediate, productive side, it also took an inevitable toll. In 1969, after the completion of Abbey Road, John told the boys he was leaving.

Next year, McCartney went his own way and that, one would have thought, was that. End of Beatles, end of era. But the Beatles would never go away because their music endured; it became part of a common heritage, a shared gift. No matter how many times they were played in elevators or gas stations, Beatles songs were too vibrant ever to qualify as “standards.” That these were Beatles songs, not the single expression of an individual, needs to be remembered amid all the Lennon eulogies, which call him the strong creative force of the group.

In the process of riding out all the massive changes of the 60s and bringing about a few on their own, the Beatles also trashed an elementary law of geometry: this was one whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Lennon was unfairly used as a means to put McCartney in his place, although Lennon had taken pains lately to redefine details of his collaboration with Paul, and to make sure credit was distributed accurately. The melodic range of the music ran from marching band to rhythm and blues, from tonal stunt flying to atonal acrobatics, once in a while all in the same song. The Beatles sang ballads that could almost be Elizabethan, rockers that still sound as if they come from the distant future, and it was hard to peg all that invention to any single source. Lennon joked about walking into a restaurant and being saluted by the band with a rendition of Yesterday, a pure McCartney effort. Many radio and video memorials to Lennon included Let It Be, another Beatles tune that was all McCartney.

If it was hard to keep the credits straight with all the Beatles, it was harder still for them to keep their friendly equilibrium. McCartney, married to Linda Eastman and staying close to the hearthside, released a series of albums that were roundly drubbed as corny, until he broke through splendidly in 1973 with Band on the Run. Lennon, married to Ono and living in New York, released a great solo record, Plastic Ono Band, then threw himself headlong into uncertainty. He and Ono lived in a series of elaborate post-hippie crash pads, became obsessed not only with artistic experimentation but with radical political flamboyance. Lennon’s subsequent albums remained achingly personal, but turned increasingly random, unfocused. They were indignant and assaultive, adrift.

When he and Ono separated for a time in the early ’70s, Lennon went on an 18-month bender of drink, drugs and general looniness. “We were all drinking too much and tearing up houses,” recalls one of his cronies at the time, Drummer Jim Keltner. “No one drank like he did. He had broken up with Ono and was with another woman at the time. Suddenly, he just started screaming out Ono’s name. That separation from her almost killed him.” Being treated as some sort of witchy parasite was no treat for the estranged Mrs. Lennon either, and when they both finally reconciled, they changed their lives in unexpected ways.

Lennon released one more record—a collection of rock oldies—then settled back with Ono in the Dakota to raise their son Sean, who was born on Oct. 9, 1975, the day of his father’s birthday. Said Lennon: “We’re like twins.” Occasionally, John and Ono would go public, often to fight the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of the Nixon Justice Department to deport Lennon on an old marijuana conviction in England. Mostly, however, they stayed at home, rearing Sean, redecorating the 25 rooms in their four Dakota apartments (art deco and artifacts of ancient Egypt, including a sarcophagus in the living room; blue clouds painted on the ceiling of a downstairs office), expanding their financial holdings (Lennon left an estate estimated at $235 million), buying property and Holstein cows.

The Holsteins were selected because they were meant to yield nourishment, not be slaughtered for it. Ono took care of all the details, and Lennon did not know about the sale of one of the cows until he read an item in the paper. He was even more pleased than surprised. “Only Yoko,” he said admiringly, “could sell a cow for $250,000.”

Ono could do a lot more than that. The banker’s daughter set herself to mastering the mysteries of commercial law and deal making just as, earlier, she had wrestled with the exotic exigencies of John Cage. She met the attorneys and the accountants; she supervised the buying up of property in Palm Beach, Fla., Cold Spring Harbor, an exclusive enclave on Long Island, and in upstate New York. When the Lennons decided to make another album earlier this year, it was Ono who called Record Executive David Geffen and worked out the deal.

The Lennons may have been taking a step or two aside from art, living quietly, but they were not hermits. They were collecting themselves, looking for a center, a core. It seemed hard to understand, but shouldn’t have been. Ono sat behind the desk and John stayed home with the little boy. Julian, Lennon’s other, older son, was now a teen-ager who lived in Britain with his mother, but wore leather jackets and jeans, like his Dad back in the days of the Quarrymen, and talked of becoming a rocker. John did not see Julian often, and said recently, “I don’t remember seeing him as a child.” But Lennon suggested that he had lately wanted to know Julian better, and one of the most haunted faces in last week’s gallery of grief was Julian’s, enduring the same pain that had afflicted his father at almost the same age some 25 years before. He, like John, had lost a parent twice.

John gloried in playing parent to Sean, and liked to call himself a househusband. What upset traditionalists was the fact that he obviously reveled in his domestic role. This role reversal was seen by the man raised by an aunt and three of her sisters as no threat at all. He insisted—indeed, proved —that he was putting nothing at risk, not his manhood and not his artistry.

Double Fantasy, the new record, demonstrated that. Ono’s contributions are especially accessible and congenial after years of punk and New Wave conditioning. John’s songs, simple, direct and melodic, were celebrations of love and domesticity that asked for, and required, no apology. It was not a great record, like Plastic Ono Band, but it might have been the start of another time of greatness.

The subjects of Double Fantasy, released last month, were supposedly not the stuff of rock, but John Lennon never bound himself to tradition. “My life revolves around Sean,” he told some radio interviewers from San Francisco on the afternoon of the day he was killed. “Now I have more reason to stay healthy and bright . . . And I want to be with my best friend. My best friend’s me wife. If I couldn’t have worked with her, I wouldn’t have bothered. . . I consider that my work won’t be finished until I’m dead and buried, and I hope that’s a long, long time.” As he spoke those words, Mark David Chapman waited for him out on the street.

Lennon’s death was not like Elvis Presley’s. Presley seemed at the end, trapped, defeated and hopeless. Lennon could have gone that way too, could have destroyed himself. But he did something harder. He lived. And, for all the fame and finance, that seemed to be what he took the most pride in.

“He beat the rock-‘n’-roll life,” Steve Van Zandt said the day after Lennon died. “Beat the drugs, beat the fame, beat the damage. He was the only guy who beat it all.” That was the victory Mark Chapman took from John Lennon, who had an abundance of what everyone wants and wanted only what so many others have, and take for granted. A home and family. Some still center of love. A life. One minute more.

—By Jay Cocks