Princess of Wails

First published in Filipinas Magazine, July 2007.

Princess Diana (Source: Guardian UK)

Ten years ago this month, I was one among the legions of people all over the world who mourned the death of Princess Diana. And like many women, I was surprised at myself for being so deeply moved by the tragedy, when I didn’t even care about her when she was alive.

The most I knew of the Princess of Wales before her death were from the tabloid headlines that I would glance at while standing in the grocery line. Yes, I knew she was unhappy and that her homely husband had a long-time mistress that he didn’t bother to hide from her. I saw her photos with her young sons and her traitorous lovers, knew that she was relentlessly pursued by the paparazzi, realized that any photo of her in the front pages of tabloids guaranteed big sales.

When she came out on TV for that infamous interview of her, looking like the victim she portrayed herself to be with her heavy black eyeliner and her gaunt face, I didn’t even bother to watch beyond the first minute.

Her universe was so remote from mine that there was nothing about her I could identify with.

And yet when she died so tragically, I grieved for her like a sister or a close friend. So swept up was I by the intense media coverage of her death and her burial that I had to take days off from work (just like some of my co-workers) because I couldn’t focus on my job. I devoured accounts of her life and updates on her death from various web sites and publications. On the sunny London day of her funeral, I stayed up all night in California to watch her casket being paraded through the streets, the very moving service at Westminster Cathedral and finally, the funeral drive to her final resting place in her family’s gigantic estate.

Through this obsession and my tears – during snippets of sobriety – I asked myself why I was grieving so. Was I was so star-struck by celebrity? (I never was, except for a brief period in high school when I went ga-ga over Susan Roces.) Was it the drama queen in me craving for the adrenaline rush of intense emotions, reminiscent of the radio soap operas I was addicted to in my youth?

A few weeks later, when my Diana fever was starting to ebb, I got together with my multicultural circle of women friends and found out that they were just as afflicted and perplexed. One of them even booked herself a ticket to London to visit Diana’s resting place, an act so uncharacteristic of her that we couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Turns out she was so immensely bothered by her spontaneous act of solidarity with the dead princess that she considered consulting a shrink.

Thus, as girlfriends are inclined to do when confronted with an emotionally charged issue that bent us out of shape, we got our heads together, functioned as each other’s therapist, and analyzed where we were in the overall sanity spectrum. Or at least in relation to Diana’s spectacular life and death.

We realized that we grieved for the princess because she was not given the chance to rise from the debris of her failures. She was an un-evolved woman still suffering the losses she endured in childhood and adulthood when her life was snuffed out. Those among us who were similarly situated or who have known the painstaking process of trying to lift oneself up from the psychological gutters understood instinctively that Diana’s fate was a cosmic injustice that no woman deserves. 

We mourned her loss because she was so beautiful– the fairy tale princess that we imagined ourselves to be in our neurotic moments when we would indulge a separate reality.

We cried for Diana because she was so starved for love and attention, that despite the adulation of the world, she felt herself so deprived because she couldn’t get the one love she wanted. Haven’t we all been in that place at some point in our lives?

We shed tears of empathy for her vulnerability, which she wore on her sleeve, setting herself up as prey to cruel and calculating predators who took advantage of her celebrity and her station to elevate themselves for status and financial gain.

Instinctively (because we hadn’t quite processed it then) we knew that Diana was an abused woman many times over. Emotionally abused by her husband who flagrantly displayed his infidelity, mentally abused by The Firm (the royal institution) who demanded so much from her and treated her as trash, physically abused by the paparazzi who hounded and chased her, and by the media who unrelentingly spread and magnified falsehoods about her.

And then of course there was the obvious good in her – the devoted mother, the champion of otherwise unpopular causes, healer of the afflicted. We lapped up stories of her charitable works and videos of her walking through land mine-infested areas, and we were overwhelmed with sadness for her children, for her country and for the world, because she could’ve done a lot more good if she had been granted a longer life.

We understood that her emotional neediness must have been too much for her husband and all the men who came after him. Those who didn’t see her as a sympathetic figure could say that Diana squandered her privileged life by living small, choosing victimhood over transcendence, glitzy superficiality over a higher calling. But who can say how she would have been, had she lived longer? Tina Brown, the hotshot former editor of Vanity Fair who had just come out with a book on the Princess of Wales, writes that at the time of her demise, Diana was at a crossroads and she was about to tread the road to a more meaningful existence.

In the final analysis, our grief over Diana’s death was really about us ordinary mortals – our world so far removed from hers -- who recognized in this poor little rich girl a kindred spirit who shared the same joys and suffered similar sorrows.

Ten years hence, we commemorate her death by giving thanks for the life we still have because it is much more than what Princess Diana was given.