He lost his mother at the young age of 14 after she succumbed to breast cancer. He has longed for her ever since.
The Beatles singer Paul McCartney was only 14 when his world changed upside down. His mother, Mary McCartney, died in 1956 from an embolism after an operation for breast cancer and the grief engulfed him completely.
When he found out about her death, he thoughtlessly said, "What will we do without her money?" in shock and regretted it ever since, according to Daily Mail. His grief on losing his mother, about whose illness he was in the dark, is something that he carried within for the rest of his life. But, that first night after she left he cried in bed all night with hands clasped in prayer promising God that he would be good if only he got her back.
"She had been a nurse, my mum, and very hardworking, because she wanted the best for us. We weren’t a well-off family—we didn’t have a car, we just about had a television—so both of my parents went out to work, and Mum contributed a good half to the family income. At night when she came home, she would cook, so we didn’t have a lot of time with each other. But she was just a very comforting presence in my life," he said. Years later, he named his daughter Mary after his mother.
The 77-year-old singer even told a Brazilian fan that if there was a time machine he would take it to "go back and spend time with my mum." It is only natural that he wrote songs about her because an artist would express that which is closest to their heart with their craft.
"When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me/Speaking words of wisdom: Let it be."
For years, people have speculated that there was a religious overtone to the song Let It Be, but it was actually about his mother, Mary. She had come to him in a dream during a night of fitful sleep. The next morning he wrote down the song and it became the famous tune the world knows of now. It was also from this grief-ridden subconscious that the lyrics for the song Yesterday came to be.
"Why she had to go I don't know she wouldn't say, I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday."
"I was going through a really difficult time around the autumn of 1968," McCartney later recalled in Marlo Thomas’ book, The Right Words at the Right Time, as per Aleteia. The Beatles were at the peak of their success but also going through difficulties. McCartney "was sensing the Beatles were breaking up." "I was staying up late at night, drinking, doing drugs, clubbing, the way a lot of people were at the time. I was really living and playing hard," he said.
Around the age of 24, he saw a dream of her, he told Barry Miles in the authorized biography, Many Years from Now. "It was so great to see her because that’s a wonderful thing about dreams: you actually are reunited with that person for a second; there they are and you appear to both be physically together again. It was so wonderful for me and she was very reassuring. In the dream, she said, 'It’ll be all right.' I’m not sure if she used the words 'Let it be' but that was the gist of her advice. It was, 'Don’t worry too much, it will turn out OK.' It was such a sweet dream I woke up thinking, 'Oh, it was really great to visit with her again.' I felt very blessed to have that dream. So that got me writing the song Let It Be."
McCartney's bond with John Lennon was spurred by their music and personal tragedies. Lennon had lost his mother two years after meeting McCartney, who had pushed himself into music making it his obsession after Mary's death.
The song given to him by his mother became the last single they recorded as a group before disbanding. Years later, in 1998, a crowd sang it to him at his wife Linda's memorial service, who died because of breast cancer too. The deeply personal song has seen him through many heartbreaks, but he wants people to take joy in it even if they want to reinforce their faith with it.
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