No, I don’t understand why this particular woman held millions of people in some sort of thrall, why we felt we knew her (although I’ve read a great deal about her from many sources, positive and negative, and I do have a good idea what she was like), and I don’t know why so many millions of people were so upset when she died. She was an icon in the true sense of the word. She was a symbol of the beautiful, romantic, tragic princess of our imagination, and she managed to tap into some part of our collective consciousness and become, for many of us, a sort of archetype.
Diana’s wedding to Charles was on at 4am where I lived. Didn’t matter. I stayed up all night to make sure I was up on time (because I was seventeen, and you can do stuff like that at that age). I watched the wedding with my grandmother, and I remember how we both sort of gasped when Diana got out of that impossibly picturesque glass carriage in that enormous dress made of all that silk and lace with absolutely the biggest train I have ever seen in my entire life (and I’ve seen a lot of weddings, thank you).
Yes, the dress was kind of poufy and it had too many bows on it in rather silly places, but Diana looked incredibly beautiful, despite the meringue of a dress. I remember watching her come down the aisle of the cathedral, that masterpiece of architecture that is the jewel in the collection of works by Sir Christopher Wren, and I remember how the diamond tiara she wore, the Spencer Tiara, glittered as she moved.
I can’t say I’ve ever thought much of Prince Charles, really. He’s said to be highly intelligent and quite charming, and that may well be the case, but he’s not particularly charismatic to the general public/media, and any charm he might have isn’t immediately apparent to the general public. Diana’s charisma, on the other hand, was dazzling…
I felt a sort of kinship with Diana. She was a woman who suffered a great deal. Perhaps some of it was her own doing. In fact, I’d say that some of it definitely was her own doing, but she was very damaged and damaged people do stupid things. She was vulnerable and emotionally needy. She was sometimes extremely unstable. She was in a marriage that was making her extremely unhappy, and she was suffering from an eating disorder and mood swings, plus she admitted to engaging in self-injury. How could I fail to identify with that?
And then, just as she was starting to get herself and her life together, to finally figure out who she was and what she was going to do with her life, she was gone. It was a bit of a shock. Okay, that’s an understatement.
I was watching Saturday Night Live on that day in 1997, and they interrupted the show to say that Diana Princess of Wales had been in a car crash in Paris. Initial reports were that she was injured, but it didn’t sound too serious. Then more reports came and then they reported that she was very seriously injured, critical. And then she was dead and I just felt like someone had punched me in the stomach and I started to weep. 
Which, of course, is quite strange, given that I didn’t even know this woman, not really. But I felt I’d lost someone that I did know. Someone beautiful and charismatic and who was trying to do some good in the world, in spite of her own failings and flaws. And, yeah, it hurt. I cried quite a lot, actually.
Mind you, at the time, I was emotionally extremely raw, myself, having been going through the absolute worst and most painful period of my life. I was emotionally unstable, I was hurting. Losing Diana most certainly did feel like I was losing a friend, or at least a kindred spirit. I felt that a light had gone out of the world. Judging by the reaction to her death, a lot of other people felt the same way.
So, well, now it’s been ten years. I’m an extremely different person now. Different name, different nationality, different family, different life.
I still miss Diana, though.
How much more must she be missed by those who really knew her and who really loved the actual woman, and not just the image, the icon, the archetype?
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