I Refuse To Let Myself Imagine the Day Paul McCartney Dies

He reminds me of this baby doll I kept throughout all of my childhood. She kept losing fingers and she had some weird stains, but I would rather die than see her in the trash.

I've been thinking a lot about death lately, really since my mom’s lung cancer diagnosis. Not in a broad sense— specifically the passing of Sir Paul McCartney. He’s not actively dying, at least that I'm aware of, but you know, he’s getting up there in age— side note, actually. Apparently Paul McCartney, who I feel like I can refer to as Paul at this point (sorry if this is upsetting), smoked loads and loads of weed, maybe even metric tons, yet his lungs are completely tumor free. My mother swore off cigarettes sometime in college, an easy decision considering she’d only smoked the occasional ciggy in the first place. Sometimes I get bitter about who gets lucky and who doesn’t when it comes to things like this. I’m trying very hard not to be.

Back to Paul. The relationship Paul and I have is parasocial at its best, oedipal at its worst— I’ve definitely lusted over a young, hunky Paul, but these days I like to think of him as a father figure. He does have a daughter my age, and I’ve never really heard anything about her so…who’s to say he didn’t abandon her on a cement front porch in nowhere, Missouri. Who’s to say she isn’t writing to you now. Sorry, that’s weird, and I’m sure she’s probably lovely, and also definitely not me.

Regardless, I was not raised by a Beatle, nor was I raised on The Beatles. I was brought up mainly by my mother, although I hear my dad was very involved when I was younger (and I choose not to explore the nuances of that). My mother’s rock n roll was different from that of British men from the 60’s, though I suppose it couldn’t exist without them, their influence as necessary to music as Athens’ to democracy. Her music was my music, the only little girl in the daycare to know that Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill actually ends with a secret acapella bonus track, not a watered down remix. I grew up with pretty top notch tunes, so I try not to hold it against my parents when I hear the most wonderful childhood accounts of first encounters with Beatles classics— dancing with Dad to “Help,” a blanket being pulled up to one's chin while “Here Comes the Sun” softly spins on a CD player. After all, they got those four fucks from Liverpool, but I got Lady Gaga, a pretty cunt choice for the woman that put notes in my lunchbox all twelve years of school. 

I remember a boy that had been sweet to me from time to time trying to “put me on to” “Eleanor Rigby,” but that’s about the only experience that predates college. I started making my little way down Penny Lane when I dated a Beatles super-fan my first semester at school, a period I spent playing rapid catch-up. Guzzling down album after album, I like to think I looked like a marathon League of Legends player— sat at my computer with bloodshot eyes until the wee hours over the morning, “wired-in.” Rubber Soul quickly caught on as my favorite, before I’d even had something to play vinyl on I’d purchased the record, the American release that starts with “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” On regular calls with my mother, I’d reserve at least fifteen minutes for an enthusiastic Beatles-based rant— how had she heard the song “Michelle” and never bothered to pass it along, did she know that their acid phase started with Revolver and not Sgt. Pepper (a common misconception)? She’d laugh me off, promising to listen to whatever little playlist I made her as a thank you for all of the music she’d bestowed upon me over the years. This must’ve been how she felt for all of my youth, aware of the obvious aural impact of artists like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and me, stubbornly shoving them aside in favor of the familiar.

I started out leaning towards Lennon: it was too early in my Beatles career to really appreciate Ringo, George (though my boyfriend at the time’s favorite) practically clung to the shadows, and to me, Paul was just the grandfather-looking fellow from “FourFiveSeconds,” his 2015 comeback attempt with Rihanna and Kanye West. He was commercial, the basic choice— John wrote for the artist, the listener wrapped up in revolutionary thought. Plus, I liked his glasses. But, bluntly, John was the wife-beater, an inescapable truth, a weighty label he deserved to carry with him even postmortem. Morally (big shocker) I’m secure in my stance as anti-abuser, thus my choice lacked all emotional investment. One thing about me: emotional investment is my expertise. Moreso, it was Paul’s expertise— if you want to invest, he’s got the emotional capital, his heartbeat rhythmically innate in his composition.

I don’t think one chooses to like Paul, he has to choose you. You put your name in his hat the first time you listen to Ram, his best solo album out of his nineteen post-Beatles releases. His scatting acts as a mating call: he’s not just the most famous living rock n’ roll legend, he’s a goofy little guy! He plays, he skips, he frolics. Do you play, do you skip, do you frolic, do you like long walks on Scottish family farms? Are you a lover, not even as opposed to being a fighter, but in every little moment and minute of your day? Have you yearned in the past 24 hours, specifically in a manner that is devoid of angst and mope? Check those boxes and you’re in.

My initiation? Five hundred miles on the road, accompanied only by an obnoxiously lengthy Paul playlist. It was motivation— I drove for him, to stand in the nosebleeds of a college stadium and watch an old pony put on a nostalgia show. It cost an arm and a leg, three toes and a sliver of my pancreas, but I figured there weren’t going to be many more tours. If there was a time to see him it was now, to sniff out even a whiff of what he used to be. My mom was unbelievably reluctant: my safety has always been her greatest concern. On nights out in high school I would come home to her still awake, tucked away in bed, just waiting to know I was okay before she drifted off. I tugged until she gave in, sending me off with a kiss on my forehead and a wave, walking me down the aisle before giving me away.

If I’m involved in a parasocial relationship, it’s this one, hands down. I’ve spent the past two years gorging myself on Paul related tidbits, and fixating on the shared ones. Both June babies, born a day (and sixty or so years) apart, we’ve both lost some time to hazed-over weed-packed days, we both possess an elephantic chip on our shoulder when it comes to producing something, making something, being propelled forward on the basis of our work.

So of course when, two days before Christmas, my mom was diagnosed with stage four metastatic lung cancer, it was him I turned to. I cried on the floor of the shower, hugging my knees, while listening to “Teddy Boy,” wondering if my dog could tell something was wrong when we left as a family of four and came back only two, my parents splitting the dorm-sized hospital bed. I spent hours dabbing at my eyes and shakily drawing in deep breaths with “Another Day” on repeat reminding myself that yes, sometimes she feels so sad, but it is just another day, one of many, for me. Throughout everything I would have to keep on living, I would have to leave my mother with one functioning lung and thirteen tiny brain tumors to return to Boston for school. I put on “Martha My Dear.” Hold your head up, you silly girl.

It was a rough winter, gnawed to shreds by the bitter everything. My brother and I brought a bag of games to the hospital for New Year’s Eve, attempting to wring something light-hearted out of the emotionally-loaded stay. She came home the next week, situated with a portable pump to vacuum the fluid out of her lungs every few days. The week after that I left. For the first time I felt like my choice to go so far for school meant abandoning my family. I could call home everyday and that wouldn’t be close to enough. It was my mom who told me I needed to go back, accomplish the things I’d set out to while she focused on getting better.

And she did, and she has. As of these past six months her scans have shown no signs of active disease, the result of targeted radiation and pills to be popped thrice a day. Our version of mundanity has been irreversibly shifted, every day has so much more weight once you realize time is not limitless, an end looms irregardless of your wants or wishes. Bucket lists became more urgent, not a far-off fantasy, so we took the family trip to Greece we’d spent the past eight years envisioning. The Beatles almost bought an island there. I suppose we had similar enough reasons for our excursions— they wanted to escape the cameras, we wanted to escape the cancer. Only we succeeded, and one of them ended up getting cancer. Cancer, for all of its flaws, never discriminates— it’ll eat men, women, and children, moms that deserve everything good the world could muster and the father of rock guitarists.

Rob Sheffield, writer of Dreaming the Beatles and one of the critics I admire most, said that “Paul is a concept by which we measure our pain.” I’d disagree— Paul is a concept by which we make sense of ourselves. I had to be told how to be a person after being reduced to pieces, retaught the facets of hope and optimism by Paul’s relentless positivity, his stupidly happy songs. I learned recently that his mom had cancer, and I don’t know why I was so surprised considering he was the source of comfort I sought out. I do not know how he got through it without Paul McCartney, which I guess is why he had to become Paul McCartney: protector of children of cancer everywhere.

Finally, and just for the record— my mom’s favorite Beatle is Ringo. I think it’s because the two of them will live forever against all logic and odds.