True Life Stories:
ON THE DEATH OF PRINCESS DIANA
by Joyce Maynard
Originally broadcast on NPR's "All Things Considered," Sunday, September 1, 1997
All day yesterday, I
kept talking about Princess Diana. I called my sister. Women friends called
me. Nothing much to say, we just wanted to check in with each other.
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 a checkout line again, reading the story of Diana's new romance
with the billionaire Harrod's heir, Dodi. 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 thirty-six 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.
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