Tim Madigan
Guest essayist

Like countless others, I can still vividly remember learning the news of John Lennon’s murder on Dec. 8, 1980. I actually found out about it on the morning of Dec. 9, when my mother told me as I came to breakfast that “Lennon was assassinated last night.”I laughed, as the words sounded so ridiculous. Surely she didn’t mean the former Beatle, who had just released an album after five years of being out of the public eye. It must have been some politician who’d been killed — after all, the word “assassinated” was usually only used to refer to world leaders. But when she made it clear that she did indeed mean John Lennon, I was shattered. (more…)

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