Roberta Flack’s Secret Role as a Mother Figure to John Lennon’s Son Sean

Singer Roberta Flack died childless, but sources say the Killing Me Softly songbird was secretly a second mother to John Lennon‘s son Sean after the Beatles great’s 1980 murder just outside his Manhattan apartment building.

The 88-year-old You Are My Heaven legend – who died from cardiac arrest in February following a number of strokes that robbed her of the ability to sing – had moved into the famed Dakota where she was a next-door neighbor to the Lennons.

Sean, now 49, recalls: “I was very blessed that I grew up with the coolest neighbor in the world – we used to call her Aunt Roberta, and we were very close.”

A source says that Roberta, who divorced her musician husband, Steve Novosel, in 1972, never remarried and never had children of her own, and grew even closer to Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono and Sean after John was fatally shot in the back by deranged pistol-packing fan Mark David Chapman, 69, who is serving 20 years to life in prison.

As Roberta helped Yoko and Sean deal with the pain of John’s assassination, they helped Flack through hard times when she was forced to largely give up her performing career for health reasons after 2015.

“It hurt Roberta deeply having to end her singing career – her dream was to keep going and keep at it until her dying day,” the source says.

“But she had people like Sean, who was like a son to her, and his mother to lean on – they were very much family to her as much as her own kinfolk, and they always were there for her right up until the sad end.”