On Saturday, October 23, 2004 at 9:49:50 AM UTC-4, Mister Charlie wrote:
> According to most of John Lennon's biographers, Lennon had an absolute
> horror of cremation, a practice that he argued against and once
> considered protesting against in a song. Despite his aversion, the
> Widow Lennon arranged to have his body burned. And from the Channel
> 4 documentary "The Real John Lennon," it is clear that none of his
> family in England were consulted about this cavalier disposal of his
> corpse.
> John's 5 year old son Sean wasn't told the awful news until the
> morning of 10 December, two days after the murder happened.
> Understandably distraught, little Sean asked to see his father one
> last time, so Lennon's assistant Fred Seaman rang security man Douglas
> MacDougal at Ferncliff Mortuary and asked him to hold off on the
> cremation so that Sean could see his dad for the last time. It was
> too late. The body had already been burned.
> But it gets worse.
> According to Seaman's account in his excellent book "The Last Days of
> John Lennon", MacDougal told him that John's face had been serene and
> calm until just before the body entered the gas oven, when suddenly it
> contorted into a "pained, macabre grin" (a la Mr. Sardonicus)
> apparently due to advanced rigor mortis.
> MacDougal had also warned Yoko a couple of months before the murder
> that the Lennons were running crazy risks by making their daily
> routine public and not having proper bodyguards. She told him she had
> no intention of arranging for John to have bodyguards.
> I believe there was something profoundly sinister about John's
> reclusive final years with the astrology obsessed Yoko Ono and her
> mind control techniques.
> George Harrison once said of visits to the Dakota, "I always felt
> there was something more that he wanted to say but didn't feel able to
> say or was afraid to. There was a sad, sometimes frightened look in
> his eyes." Look at some pictures of Lennon in the studio not long
> before his death at www.vintagebb.com/lennon.html
> He doesn't look like a well man to me.

He doesn't look particularly healthy in the last photographs, I agree. He also admittedly had a chronic cough from the decades of smoking.

Yoko said that a single glass of wine would make him unable to function for a day. A single glass?!?