Yoko Ono’s family have shared how the artist is spending her final days after the death of her husband John Lennon. Now aged 92, Yoko’s family says she is “in a happy place”, and is “listening to the wind and watching the sky” after losing Beatles star John in 1980 when he was only 40 years old.
Yoko – best known for her activism and for helping Lennon write his hit song Imagine – has been profiled in a new book releasing this week, which paints her as a reclusive figure in her early nineties. She lives alone in upstate New York on a farm, but is thankfully visited by her son Sean and daughter Kyoko. Kyoko wrote of her mother: “She believed she could change the world, and she did… now she is able to be quiet – listen to the wind and watch the sky.” She added: “She is very happy, in a happy place. This is well deserved and genuine peacefulness.”
Her son Sean added: “She had this ability to overcome difficulty with positive thinking. She really wanted to teach the world to do that. She taught my dad to do that. It’s not going to stop a moving train or a bullet. But I think there’s something profound about it. And I think it affected the world.”
Yoko handed a lot of her businesses over to her son Sean in 2020, with him being appointed director at eight companies linked to both his mother and the Beatles. Her last public appearance came a year before, in 2019, when Yoko appeared via video message to open the Manchester International Festival. Before that, she appeared in person at the Come Together NYC launch in September 2018, alongside Ringo Starr.
She lived for 50 years in the New York apartment where John Lennon was shot and killed on the steps outside, before moving out to her 600-actre farm in Franklin, to a property she bought with her husband in 1978.
Her marriage to John was her third – Yoko first tied the knot with Toshi Ichiyanagi in 1956, divorcing him in 1962. That year she married Anthony Cox, but they had their marriage annulled only a year later before deciding to give it another go – but divorced in 1969.
Her daughter Kyoko Yoko shares with Anthony, while she and John welcomed Sean together in 1975.
