It’s weird for Bob Dylan to have written a eulogy for John Lennon, considering he barely knew the guy (and by all accounts, didn’t have much use for him), and it’s especially weird for him to have written it over forty years after the man’s death. Scott Beauchamp and Alex Shepard suggested in The Atlantic that it was because by then, Lennon had evolved into a myth, which meant he can now be a mythical character in one of Dylan’s songs, and I think that’s right, but I think that idea can be taken further. My experience with grief is that it’s an emotion based on the phrase ‘what if this person were still alive?’. The day after someone dies, I’m consumed with how they’d react to events. What kind of funeral would they want? What would they say to me taking that new job? What would they think of the news*? But as time passes, these kind of questions become harder to answer, and I mean literally – it’s easy to wonder what someone would do a day or a month after they die, but ten years down the track, you might as well ask me what the world would be like now if WWII never happened. People change too much, themselves and the world around them, to accurately pinpoint where they’d be if they were still here.

I believe Bob Dylan reads it exactly the opposite way. His is a mind alive with possibility – one that finds an infinite number of variations on a melody or a chord or a whole structure, a new use for a word or a character or a myth. I can believe the process of coming up with “Roll On, John” took decades, as Dylan saw the effects of Lennon’s death on the world, the various Myths of John Lennon that sprung up, and he soaked these ideas all up and saw where else they could go. He sees worlds where he and Lennon could be old ex-pop stars hanging out together, and he can grieve the loss of those possibilities. And through that, he taps into the universal nature of grief, and I find myself feeling my loss all over again.

We were all about the same age and heard the same exact things growing up. Our paths crossed at a certain time, and we both had faced a lot of adversity. We even had that in common. I wish that he was still here because we could talk about a lot of things now.
– Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone

*I think if my Nan had made it to November 2016 she would have died of a rage-stroke rather than a regular one.