Thoughts On Seeing Princess Diana

The tribute to Princess Diana today, ten years after her death, brought to mind the same two memories that I always have when I think about her. I always remember what I was doing when I heard she had died, and I remember the day I saw her in person. I'm not a royal watcher but her death was so unexpected, and I realised that somehow, even though I avoided all the tabloid nonsense and latest gossip, news and images of Princess Diana were so ubiquitous that I did think of her, recognise her picture as I passed magazine stands, and that she was often brought to mind. It was like that. I remember pushing a trolley along in the supermarket and there would be rows of magazines all with photos of her on the cover.

The night she died I was cooking in the kitchen, and could hear the tv news from the living room. I wasn't paying too much attention, being engrossed in the finer points of peeling potatoes at the time. I heard the news anchor say, "Princess Diana", and I thought, "Why don't they leave her alone. I'm sick of their carry on". And then I heard the words "car crash" and "died" and shot into the living room. I couldn't believe it, the way you don't believe something that is a bolt out of the blue. And I felt very sad, and wished at that moment that it had been some tabloid nonsense instead. I phoned my best friend. "Princess Diana died", I said. "I know", she said. And we both talked about how we felt sad. "I don't know why I feel so sad", I said. "I didn't follow all the stuff about her". My friend felt sad too.

I had watched her wedding live on tv - it was a fairy tale wedding. A beautiful princess in a pageant. It seemed perfect. Lots of talk afterward about her dress, and her slip when saying Prince Charles name. It seemed like a "they lived happily ever after" story. I saw her not long after she was married on her first visit to New Zealand. The newspaper published a map of the route she would take from the airport, with the approximate times at each point. A bunch of us friends thought we'd go down and wave as she passed. None of us had done anything like that before. So we went down a few blocks and stood near a corner. A few other people were there. Not loads of people, just about 15 of us all together. Much talk about whether we were on the right side of the road. What if Prince Charles was sitting on this side? Oh no! We decided, without any real logical basis, that a princess would sit on the left. She did.

The car passed us slowly, I suppose to give people an opportunity to see her. She was young, and looked very tired, but still waved to us, and we waved back. I felt a bit silly actually, because I didn't know her at all and she looked so incredibly human, and weary, and yet she was still managing a wave. Other friends further up the road said she had stopped waving by the time she passed them. "Very tired", we said. "Very pretty", we added. Then we were quiet, and I was thinking that I had just seen the most famous woman in the world, and she looked, well she looked like a normal person. Truth be told I felt a bit sorry for her, and wondered if she would be able to arrive at her wherever she was staying and kick off her shoes, have a cuppa, and crash on a bed.

She became something else in the years after that visit. A mother, a symbol, an icon, and something of a legend. Was I a teensy bit jealous that she got to dance with John Travolta? Well yes I was. Like millions of others I watched her funeral live on television with tissues handy. We talked about it at work the next day. There had been, even with us who were not real royal watchers, a sense of outrage at the way she died, and anger at the parasitic papparazzi. I had lunch with a good friend a couple of weeks after Princess Diana died and we talked about it. "It's hysteria", said my friend, referring to the huge outpouring of grief. "People have lost some-one they considered important", I said. "Yes but it is so huge", said my friend, "and why is there this hysteria?" She added, "I think because she was so beautiful". I agreed that the image of beauty was part of it. And then I said that I thought there was something else - that people really were captured by the idea of royalty coming down to touch the common people. Royalty coming out of the palace to hold lepers hands. "That hits deep", I said.

I am reminded of a line from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when Aslan says, "there is a deeper magic". Our hearts respond to royalty that walks among the outcasts, the sick, and the suffering. There is a deeper truth. I'm glad I saw Princess Diana that day - that I saw her as a tired young woman, as human as anyone else, and that just like anyone, she was travelling with a mixture of her own needs and those of others. And I think too of that longing we can have in our hearts for a king who comes down to walk among his subjects, to know what we know, experience what we experience, and to lift us up, and that connecting with that deeper reality stirs us and turns us upside down.