Saint Diana: 20 years of grief

I felt deep admiration for Mother Teresa’s faith and work, but when she died I did not mourn. I was too busy weeping buckets for Princess Di.

By Rick - revised version of Princess Diana, Bristol 1987, CC BY 2.0, Wikicommons.

By Rick – revised version of Princess Diana, Bristol 1987, CC BY 2.0, Wikicommons.

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I got the news that Princess Diana had been in a car accident. If you’re of a certain age, you probably do too.

Phil and I had just finished watching a video, and when it was over the TV automatically reverted to the channel we had most recently watched, which was having a breaking news announcement.


Diana had been injured in a car accident in Paris, the announcer said; they were receiving reports that she had broken her arm. We were not overly concerned, and started watching something else we’d recorded. When that was over and the live TV returned again, we were greeted with an announcement at the bottom of the screen in memory of “Diana, 1961–1997.”

What?

In shock, I began to cry. I remained glued to the news for days afterward, watching the funeral, weeping at her sons’ grief.

Phil was perplexed by this: Yes, of course it was a tragedy that a person with young children had died so suddenly and so senselessly. But why was I so personally involved? It’s not like I’d ever met her.

But I had met the equally famous woman whose death followed Diana’s by mere days. Mother Teresa visited New Jersey in 1995, just two years before, back when I was writing occasional freelance stories for the Princeton Packet. The paper sent me down to Trenton with a photographer. So when I say I “met” Mother Teresa, it’s not like I talked to her privately, but I did get to be part of a quick meet-and-greet she did with the local press.

I felt deep admiration for Mother Teresa’s faith and work, but when she died I did not mourn. I was too busy weeping buckets for Princess Di.

Clearly I was not the only one, judging from the world’s outpouring of grief. What can explain this crazy international bereavement for the princess? What compassionate madness seized so many of us twenty years ago that we dropped everything to bemoan the loss of this person?

In Lifecraft, Unitarian minister Forrest Church muses on this phenomenon, wondering why Diana should receive global media attention while one of the holiest persons of the modern era passed away so quietly.


But that, Church suddenly realizes, is precisely the point: we revere Mother Teresa, even love her, but we know we could never be like her. We will never be intimate with her. Diana, on the other hand, is a delightful screw-up as a saint, full of vanity, self-destructive tendencies, and broken relationships. We understand her viscerally. Church writes:

We admire other people’s strength, but when it comes right down to it, their weakness strikes a closer chord. We don’t identify with Princess Diana because she was royal, or because she was beautiful. We identify with her because we could see our tears in her eyes.

Diana is honored as a secular saint because she was a wounded healer, one who had love to spare for everyone save herself. Just like us.

If it’s frailty we’re attracted to, like moths to a flame, we can embrace Diana because she was so exposed, so unsure of herself, so needy. Unlike Mother Teresa – whose posthumously published journals only later revealed the doubt and struggles that characterized her private life — the princess was achingly vulnerable in real time, unable to hide her pain.

That is why we loved her. That is why we grieve.

 

 

This post is adapted and expanded from Jana Riess and Mark Ogilbee, American Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys and Spiritual Destinations, 160–161.

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