I heard of Linda McCartney’s passing from my mother, who sent me an e-mail saying she felt very much saddened by Linda’s death. “It seems to be the beginning of the end of an era, or something like that,” she wrote. I too felt sad, and surprised, because I thought that she had beaten the breast cancer. I used to listen to my parents’ Wings album all the time as a little girl. I followed the lyrics on the sleeve and looked at the pictures of Paul and Linda and that other guy whose name nobody ever remembers, and I remember finding the concept of a married couple playing in a band together sort of weird but sort of neat also. In college, I bought the Wings album on CD, and when I put it on the stereo in my room, it brought me right back to the afternoons I used to spend stretched out on the red rug in our living room, making up exciting stories about fugitive musicians in my head to go along with “Band On The Run.”

A healthy cottage industry has sprung up around making fun of and dismissing both Wings and Paul McCartney. Music Nazis love to talk about the Beatles by framing the discussion in Lennon- versus-McCartney terms – Lennon, the genius, the artistic visionary, the tragic figure; McCartney, the pretty face, the bubblegum pop hack, the poseur. Having reached the flawed and unoriginal conclusion that John Lennon represented the heart and soul of the Beatles, the self-styled alternarati then train the burning laser of their contempt upon Wings. “Cheesy,” they remark with their usual devastating insight, or “lite-FM much?” For a finale, they remark derisively that Linda sucked musically, and besides, she broke up the Beatles and pussy-whipped Paul into becoming a vegetarian. Well, pardon me while I bust out the alphabet blocks and spell “w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r.” I don’t know exactly what proportion of ingredients made the Beatles so wonderful, but I suspect it had something to do with the whole band coming together (so to speak) at a certain time and creating a certain sound – together. I don’t disagree with the premise that John had a more cutting-edge sensibility than Paul, but John invited Paul into the band to begin with, so perhaps we should trust his judgment. As for Linda, she didn’t exactly rock out, but she got it done, more than we can say for the self-important shrieking hairball John selected as his soulmate – or for Big John at the end of his life, when he slept all day and sent Yoko’s secretary out on drug runs at night while making collages from his toenail clippings. Maybe the McCartneys went a little overboard on the vegan thing, but they really seemed to believe in the principle of protecting animals and they stuck to it, unlike some Tibetan-bandwagon-hopping celebrities I could name.

The McCartneys also got married and stayed that way for thirty years, probably a school-and-pool record for the music industry. My brother and I checked out a Paul McCartney show at Giants Stadium about five years ago, and I don’t love stadium shows, but I enjoyed this one; they showed lots of nifty video footage and photos (probably taken by Linda) on the big screens next to the stage. Paul and Linda clearly loved playing together on the big stage, and even from the nosebleed seats I could tell they still dug each other. I felt sad for Sir Paul when I heard that Linda had died, and I felt even worse for him when the press dug up the assisted-
suicide story (at the behest of Kenneth Starr, no doubt) and began to make ghoulish hay of the fact that Linda actually died on the McCartney ranch in Arizona and not in Santa Barbara as stated in Paul’s press release. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if my doctor told me I had liver cancer, which basically means that I would suffer a rapid and painful decline over the course of several weeks, culminating in a total system shutdown, I would gather my loved ones around me and gulp down a double handful of Percodan too. If she did decide to hasten the process, I don’t blame her one bit, and whether she did or not, I don’t see why it matters to anyone but her family. My mother’s comment about an era beginning to end struck a chord with me, but on the other hand, the inappropriate nosiness masked as investigative journalism couldn’t belong to any era but this one.

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding Linda McCartney’s death, I feel a strange sense of loss – not because of her contributions to the culture, necessarily, but because we lost another one to breast cancer. Whenever I hear about or meet a woman who survived breast cancer, I feel a little thrill of pride on her behalf. Another win for the good guys, I think to myself; another one for our team. Until last week, I counted Linda McCartney among the survivors, one of the hundreds of thousands of women who lost lymph nodes and hair and their appetites and one or both of their breasts, women who slapped on wigs and dug their heels in and fought, flat-chested and pissed off, and won. I count my mother’s best friend among those warriors too, which might explain Ma’s sadness, the same sadness as mine that one of the good guys fought like hell but lost, and died at the age of 56 – the same age as my mother.

Sorry about the downbeat tone this week. Even I can’t make breast cancer funny.

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