When the world lost Linda McCartney in April 1998, headlines called it “the end of an era.”
For Paul McCartney, it was something else entirely — the beginning of silence he’s still learning to fill.

More than two decades later, Sir Paul still speaks of his late wife in the present tense. “I talk to her,” he once confessed quietly in an interview. “You can’t just stop that connection. Sometimes I’ll be driving, and I’ll say, ‘What do you think, Lin?’ And somehow, I still get an answer.”

The Letters That Never Stopped Coming

In the months following Linda’s death from breast cancer, Paul began writing letters — not to publishers, not to fans, but to her.
Simple, handwritten notes, tucked into his notebooks or left on the piano in his Sussex home.

“It’s funny,” he once said, “I still sign them ‘Love, P.’ Even though I know she doesn’t need reminding.”

Friends close to the McCartney family describe these letters as half-diary, half-conversation. In one, he wrote about watching their daughter Mary take photographs — “just like her mum.” In another, he joked about how his vegetarian cooking still wasn’t quite as good as hers.

They weren’t meant for the world to see — but in their quiet honesty, they tell the story of a man still in dialogue with his greatest love.

Love in the Little Things

Paul and Linda’s marriage was one of rock ’n’ roll’s rare constants — thirty years of touring, raising kids, making art, and escaping to their farm in Scotland.
While other couples courted fame, the McCartneys chose simplicity: muddy boots, homegrown food, family jam sessions.

After her passing, Paul described the hardest adjustment as the silence at breakfast. “She’d hum while making tea,” he told Rolling Stone. “It wasn’t even a tune sometimes — just life humming along.”

To fill that quiet, he returned to music — the only language they both spoke fluently. Songs like “Calico Skies” and “Little Willow” became letters in melody form, messages he could send into the ether.

“You never really leave me, do you?”

During his 2022 “Got Back” tour, as images of Linda flashed on the big screen behind him during “Maybe I’m Amazed,” Paul looked up for a brief moment and whispered, almost to himself:

“You never really leave me, do you?”

The crowd roared. But for Paul, it wasn’t a performance — it was communion.

To millions, she was the rock star’s wife. To him, she was the rhythm that never stopped.

And so he keeps writing — in songs, in scribbles, in memory.Because some love stories don’t end when someone leaves.

They just change shape.