PRINCESS DIANA

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who learned she had been expected to be a little boy. So intent were her parents on a son that they failed to prepare for the possibility of her appearance, and she had to wait till the week after her birth to receive her full name: Diana Frances Spencer. Two older sisters (and the brother who eventually arrived) would have royal godparents, but her father and mother chose commoners to swear their faith for her at the baptismal font.

Her first memory was of plastic, a warm synthetic smell touched off by sunlight on her stroller. She would also remember visits to the churchyard grave of the child her parents conceived just before her, a boy who had lived barely 10 hours. If he had survived, she often wondered, would she have existed? Or would her mother, having produced a male heir, have left her husband for another man earlier than she did, before Diana could be born? After her parents split up, Diana bravely declared that she would marry only once, and only for love, and never, ever divorce.

And then, once upon a time again, the same little girl grew up and fell in love and married a prince. She seemed so happy for such a splendid moment that the whole world paused to marvel at and rejoice with her, falling in love with Diana in love. But she quickly learned that the dynasty she had joined was dysfunctional and synthetic, that although she had borne her husband an heir, she could never truly become his Queen. And when she died, suddenly, a day after the 36th anniversary of her christening, the world, still in love, stopped for a very long moment to grieve.

Why did so many people mourn? Why do so many mourn her still? Was it because when the heroine of a fairy tale perishes, something dies in us as well? Diana shared with many people the fond if naive belief that the perfectibility of the family--making it stable, firm, happy--would help save humankind. Her father and mother had failed miserably at family. She did not intend to. But she stumbled into the very nightmare she sought to avoid and became the spectacular mirror for other people's disappointments: the most splendid of cautionary tales. In the monumental ruin of Diana's life, people saw the limits of their own aspirations.

Many look back in embarrassment over the tears they shed. But was it unnatural to be touched? Gerard Manley Hopkins once gave voice to that primal emotion:

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed; It is the blight man was born for...

It is ourselves we mourn for.

--By Howard Chua-Eoan