“McCartney added in a new interview with BBC Radio that he was much more open with his grief for his wife than his father was when he lost his mom, who passed away from the same disease when the musician was just a teen.”
‘I think I cried for about a year on and off,’ McCartney says of mourning Linda. “You expect to see them walk in, this person you love, because you are so used to them. I cried a lot. It was almost embarrassing except it seemed the only thing to do.’
The rocker recalls a much different way of coping in his family when his mom Mary died of breast cancer at age 47.
“We had no idea what my mum had died of because no one talked about it,” McCartney said. "She just died. The worse thing about that was everyone was very stoic, everyone kept a stiff upper lip and then one evening you’d hear my dad crying in the next room. It was tragic because we’d never heard him cry,’ he added. ‘It was a quiet private kind of grief.’
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“My mother’s death broke my Dad up. That was the worst thing for me, hearing my Dad cry. I’d never heard him cry before. It was a terrible blow to the family. You grow up real quick, because you never expect to hear your parents crying. You expect to see women crying, or kids in the playground, or even yourself crying—and you can explain all that. But when it’s your dad, then you know something’s really wrong and it shakes your faith in everything. But I was determined not to let it affect me. I carried on. I learnt to put a shell around me at that age. There was none of this sitting at home crying – that would be recommended now, but not then. That became a very big bond between John and me, because he lost his mum early on, too. We both had this emotional turmoil which we had to deal with and, being teenagers, we had to deal with it very quickly. We both understood that something had happened that you couldn’t talk about – but we could laugh about it, because each of us had gone through it. It wasn’t OK for anyone else. We could both laugh at death—but only on the surface. John went through hell, but young people don’t show grief—they’d rather not. Occasionally, once or twice in later years, it would hit in. We’d be sitting around and we’d have a cry together; not often, but it was good.”
Paul discusses his mother’s death summarized here and here.