Remember Diana ...

Photo Credit: Tim Graham

I admit it -- I never met Princess Diana. I saw her in person only once, as she got off a plane at the airport in Ottawa and stepped into her waiting car. So why did I mourn her death so strongly? Many other famous people have died, and while I have been briefly sad, I can’t honestly say I have mourned them. What was it about this woman that affected me, and millions more, so deeply?

At first, I loved her because it’s every little girl’s dream to be a princess. And what a princess she was! I turned five the summer Diana married her prince, and I remember getting up very early in the morning to watch her wedding -- it was everything a royal wedding should be, full of romance and beauty and grandeur and pageantry and majesty and happiness, and at the centre of it all was the figure of that dazzling bride. Like millions of other little girls that summer, I wanted to be Princess Diana more than anything in the world. And I wanted to be her for years, as she became the most beautiful, glamourous woman I could imagine. I collected pictures of her in all of her beautiful clothes, attending all of her magical parties. She was my ideal of a princess.

But ultimately, as I grew older, I loved Diana because she *wasn’t* perfect. She had flaws, just like me, and she admitted that. She made her mistakes, she messed up, but she tried so hard, and she always seemed to rise above her failures. She was unhappy, but she threw herself into making other people happy. She gave so much of herself to other people and the causes that were dear to her. And, perhaps most importantly, she raised two beautiful boys who will always be a credit to her. It was clear to everyone who saw her with them how much she loved them, and how they adored her.

I will never forget where I was or how I heard that Diana had been killed in a car accident in Paris. Sixteen years after I woke up so early for her wedding, I again got up at 4:30 and silently watched her funeral. I wept for her boys as they bravely followed their mother’s coffin, and I knew she would have been so proud of how they carried themselves that day. I cried again when Elton John sang his beautiful tribute (click here to read the lyrics to "Candle in the Wind '97"), and when Diana’s brother paid homage to her beauty, both inside and out.

I guess part of the reason I mourned Diana so deeply was the senseless way in which she died. It didn’t have to happen. I blame her drunk, speeding driver, I blame anyone who knew the man was drunk and still allowed him to get behind the wheel, and I even blame Diana herself for not wearing a seatbelt. But I also blame the media. Not just the photographers who were chasing her that night, and not even just the tabloids, but the entire media who took that woman’s life away from her when she was younger than I am now, and made her public property for sixteen years. And through them, I blame myself, for thinking of her too often as an object, a pretty picture to look at, and not as the beautiful, caring, individual human being she deserved to be. Diana was a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, a friend, an aunt, and those people deserved to have her longer than they did. She deserved to find happiness and live out a long life surrounded by her loved ones, not to die at 36 in a tunnel in Paris.

I don’t know if I’ve explained myself very well here, but I needed to try to put into words why the death of a woman I never knew hurt so much. I still find it hard sometimes to believe she’s gone, but I think her impact on the world will remain for years to come.

Rest in peace, Diana, and know that you were loved, and are missed more than you could ever know.

visit this site to learn more about the campaign to remember Diana, Princess of Wales, and find some links to other pages in her memory.

Visit my Diana Photo Gallery

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