A month later, still it hurts. Even after a funeral the likes of which the world has never seen, the memory of Diana, Princess of Wales continues to haunt us.Immediately after the news hit, two writers reflected on what made Diana special to so many women. We found their perspectives helpful, so we share their thoughts here.
We have never done a tribute in these pages before, but then, we've never seen anything like the death of Princess Diana before.
- On the death of Princess Diana
- Books on Princess Diana
- Every girl's dream, every woman's nightmare
- Remembering Diana
On the death of Princess Diana
Most of us were taken by surprise, to discover how upset we were at the death of a woman we'd never met, or gotten anywhere close to, whose life bore so little similiarity to our own.
Tragedies happen everyday, in which people die whose lives are every bit as precious as Diana's. But I've always felt an odd connection to Diana. When the world first met her, she was so young and hopeful (the way I was, the way we all are, as we enter into marriage. Gazing into the eyes of our beloved, supposing he will love us forever, same as we will always love him.)
She had two sons. Same ages as mine. And it seemed to me, from where I stood watching her life, in the supermarket checkout line, that she was doing the best job she could in an extraordinarily difficult situation, putting some degree of normalcy into the lives of these two boys of hers, who were being groomed for the impossibly anachronistic life of monarch, and monarch-in-waiting.
We knew her only from photographs. But even in those early photographs you could tell she and her husband were ill-suited to each other. As a person inhabiting her own difficult marriage, I recognized the signs. Eventually Prince Charles himself announced on national television that he never really loved Diana. From her came word that just before that fairytale wedding the television networks keep rerunning, Prince Charles was calling up his mistress.
Charles and Diana divorced. Same as my husband and I did. And once again, I felt I shared something with Diana.
It's a lonely business, being a single mother. Especially if -- like Diana -- you dare to hope that someday, you might actually fall in love with someone again. If it was hard for me, finding a man who could deal with the complicated package of my life, how must it have been for Diana? Where was the man who could pick up the phone and call her up to go dancing?
Diana possessed the heart of an incorrigible romantic, I think. Sixteen years ago she rode into our lives in a Cinderella carriage. She loved beautiful dresses -- and then hung them out on the racks of the world's most expensive thrift shop, Christies', for ordinary mortals to see. I couldn't have afforded to buy one of those gowns of hers that were auctioned off earlier this summer, of course. But I studied the photographs anyway, and I loved imagining myself trying one on.
In recent weeks, I stood in checkout line again, reading the story of Diana's new romance with the billionaire Harrod's heir, Dodi el Fayed. Diana's love affair with Dodi suggested a happy ending, at last. Her death signalled the impossiblity of that. For her, at least.
Diana's death reminds me -- reminds us all, I think -- of how fragile beauty and happiness can be. Saturday afternoon she was jetting into Paris with her billionaire lover. Today every one of us, whatever our misfortune, is luckier than Diana.
For the rest of my life I will think about her, as I read about her sons in "People" magazine. I will think of her now and then as I watch my own sons grow up, and marry, and go on to take jobs other than King of England.
"Don't forget to treasure your mother," I told my boys as they disappeared out our door on their skateboards this morning, the last day of summer vacation. Likewise I tell myself to treasure them. And to treasure the sunlight, and the clouds, and the coffee in my mug, and the hawks circling out my window, and the man I love, and the ones I used to love, and the blood in my veins, and the air I breathe, and even the time I have to spend, standing in the checkout line, stocking up on my sons' school supplies.
There is not one good thing to say about the death of Princess Diana. Except that all over this big planet, people are thinking about it. For a few days anyway, we are a global community. And it's not celebrity-worshipping shallowness that explains how millions of people could all feel so much grief over the death of a single woman. The woman who died simply exemplified, more than most, grace and tenderness and romantic spirit in the face of hard and punishing experience.
Now there will be no more photographs of Princess Diana, of course. So now Diana will always be 36 years old. She will always be beautiful, and elegant. I will think of her forever, racing through a tunnel in Paris at a hundred miles an hour, hopeful and in love.
Joyce Maynard is the author of the novel "Where Love Goes" and maintains a Web site at www.joycemaynard.com. This piece first aired on NPR's "All Things Considered."
Books about Princess Diana include:
And yet, when I did get home and the first image to appear on the television screen was of the hideously mangled Mercedes being loaded onto a truck, a blue banner running the width of the picture proclaiming simply, "PRINCESS DIANA DEAD," I didn't think about feeling foolish. I just sat on the couch and cried for a woman I didn't know.
I have a busy life and sadnesses of my own. Why do I feel such heartbreak over the death of not just any celebrity, but the most photographed woman of our time, a woman born to wealth and privilege, someone for whom I never expressed undue interest before? This was the question gently put to me by my (second) husband the day after the news, as we were leaving for the summer's last family mini-vacation and I was still clutching a newspaper in disbelief.
I can cite my mother ache for Diana's two young sons, who woke to learn that they were motherless. The needlessness of her death is obvious, as is the waste of her youth, vivacious beauty and evident compassion. But ridiculous as it may sound, I feel Diana's death as a more personal loss, one expressed, for different reasons, by the people of Diana's ancestral seat in Northamptonshire, where the newspaper headline on Sunday read, "WE'VE LOST OUR PRINCESS." Indeed, that is just whom I have lost. My princess.
My mother's generation had two princesses. Grace Kelly, upon her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco, was the first, and it was no sheer coincidence that the White House era of John and Jackie Kennedy was known as "Camelot." Diana Spencer and I were contemporaries, less than a year apart in age. Though she may have played the fantasy games that I played, imagining that a '60s version of princeliness would carry me off (my friends and I played "Married to the Beatles," and I wouldn't be surprised if Diana did too), by a stroke of fate Diana was born into a class with real princes and the possibility for real-life fairy-tale romance.
What little girl has ever grown up not imagining that someday she might marry the prince? The games we play, the fairy tales we hear as little girls shape our romantic fantasies as women. (I'm reminded of a friend's 4-year-old daughter, who recently sat next to a polite 12-year-old boy on a plane. Upon arriving at their destination, my friend's daughter looked up at her seatmate, who had gamely played a few hands of Go Fish with her, and said, "Well, goodbye. It's been nice being married to you.") We play house, we daydream about movie stars and our friends' older brothers, we plan our "weddings" during slumber parties. In the process, we begin to form our expectations for romantic happiness, and at least some of those expectations stick with us, no matter how outwardly realistic or feminist we pride ourselves in being. (Think of all the women you know who had white weddings after all . . .)
Of the estimated billions who watched sweet, shy, virginal 19-year-old Lady Di marry her prince, at least half of them must have been other 19-year-old girls like me, fascinated by the hand-sewn beading on the puffy sleeves of her dress, nodding our heads approvingly over the weight she¹d lost in the stressful weeks leading up to the wedding, puzzling over the mysteries of marriage, especially to a man 12 years your senior with a bad reputation. About Prince Charles' liking for the ladies, we thought with blind satisfaction: He's been searching the world over (slipper tucked into his pocket), and now he's found her, a girl pure enough and good enough to be his princess.
And so in the years to follow, with our archetypal princess taken care of, we were free to get busy with our own fairy-tale endings, our carefully orchestrated pomp and blushing betrothals. Ominously, as we came to the part of the story that always reads "... and they lived happily ever after," we began to realize that a whole bunch of details had been omitted about how you actually manage to live happily ever after with princes who, it turns out, maybe don't love you or don't love you enough, or with the pressure and power of families.
Here, then, is the ironic flip side of Diana, our princess: Diana, as her fairy tale dissolved and her prince failed her, became our sister. Once the truth of her unhappy marriage became known and the gilt of royalty rubbed off, Diana was just another girlfriend suffering the public humiliations of a cheating husband. Just another young mom with skittish, unhelpful in-laws and a husband who was jealous that she had so many friends. We could understand -- those of us whose husbands didn't love us, who felt isolated and trapped by circumstances, who wanted to protect our children from hurt, who lived through the failure of our romantic dreams. And as mothers, as wives, as strong women, we rooted for her during her fight to leave the royal family on her own terms, with equal custody of her sons and a fair settlement for spending her youth with a man so craven that he would allow his family to browbeat him into marrying a 19-year-old -- a girl! -- he later confessed he never loved. Just as she vindicated our girlish belief in the princess of fairy tales, so Diana stood as an example of strength for all the women like her, like me, who suffered the bitter disappointments of unhappy marriages.
Just last week, or maybe the week before, I caught the headline of some magazine at the market checkout line. "Di in Love," it said, or "A Boyfriend for Diana." Something like that. Good for you, Diana, I remember thinking casually, hoping it was true. Just as I would hope for the happiness of any woman whose story I know as I know Diana's: remotely, from a distance, but with heartfelt empathy.
The belief in the fairy tale, that died a long time ago. Not because of Diana, but alongside her: As Diana was crying over Charles' infidelities, I was crying over my first prince's human frailties. The more important belief, the fleeting wish that, like me, Diana might have found some lasting contentment, died on Saturday night in Paris. And yet, as I lay in bed at night worrying about Diana's two boys and hoping that their mother's love will sustain them through this most horrible nightmare of childhood, I can't stop thinking of Diana, too. And hoping that it really was true: that Dodi Fayed loved her passionately, and in these last five weeks of her too-short life she did feel that delicious ache of being loved and desired, that his body was perfume to her, that, right at the end, Diana, our queen of broken hearts, had had her faith in love restored. That she could fall in love and -- maybe not live happily every after, but have a nice life with someone. Just like regular people.
Kate Moses is an editor at Salon. This article first appeared in Salon, an online magazine at http://www.salonmagazine.com.
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