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Two years
Two years ago, on the last Saturday night in August, I was working the night shift in the ICU at our hospital in Toledo, Ohio. When I came in at eleven, one of the aides met me at the desk and just said, "There's been an accident in Paris. Princess Diana." Somebody had the little TV going in the break room and we watched between patients. Right around midnight the news came that she had died. I remember the room went completely quiet, and then the call light went on in bed 6 and I went, because that's the job. I cried in the parking lot at seven in the morning with the sun coming up. I was sixteen when she got married. I set my alarm for four in the morning on July 29, 1981, so I wouldn't miss one minute, and I sat on the floor in front of our old Zenith in my nightgown and watched her come up the steps of St. Paul's with that train going on forever behind her. Sixteen years later, I set my alarm again for her funeral. Same hour of the morning. Different television. I don't think I'll ever get over that. |
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Why I still remember her
It isn't the dresses (though I loved the dresses). It's what she did with her hands. I'm a nurse, so I'll tell you why that matters to me. 
In April of 1987, when people were still afraid to be in the same room with
someone who had AIDS, she opened a ward for AIDS patients at the Middlesex
Hospital in London and shook a patient's hand without gloves, and the
cameras got it. You cannot imagine now how much that one handshake
mattered. I had patients' own families who wouldn't touch them. She did.
She sat on the beds of leprosy patients and held their hands. She took her
boys to homeless shelters so they would know. In January of 1997 she walked
through a minefield being cleared in Angola, in a flak jacket and visor, so
the world would look at landmines, and the world looked. That August, only a
few weeks before she died, she went to Bosnia to meet people who had lost
arms and legs to mines.
In June of 1997 she sold seventy-nine of her dresses at an auction in New
York and gave the millions it raised to AIDS and cancer charities. The
dresses she was most photographed in, gone, for other people. I think about
that a lot.
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Two years on
♦ The treaty banning landmines, signed by more than a hundred countries in Ottawa that December, became international law on March 1 of this year. She didn't live to see it. I believe she helped make it happen. (Our own country still hasn't signed. I've written my congressman. You could too.) ♦ Prince William turned seventeen in June. Prince Harry turns fifteen on September 15. Every time I see a picture of those boys I think about the two of them walking behind her coffin, and I hope with my whole heart that they are all right. ♦ Her family opened a museum about her life at Althorp, the Spencer home, last summer, open July and August. She's buried there, on a little island in a lake. Someday I'll go. ♦ And this June, my husband Rich and I finally took the trip to Paris we'd been saving for since our wedding. On our last evening I walked down to the Place de l'Alma. There's a big golden flame there, a full-size copy of the one on the Statue of Liberty's torch, that was a gift to France years before any of this, and it sits right above the tunnel. Nobody planned it, but it has become her memorial. There were notes and flowers and photographs all over the base, in English and French and Japanese and languages I couldn't read, almost two years later. I left a red rose and a note from Ohio. I didn't stay long. I didn't need to. |
| A note, since I get e-mail about it: there are a lot of Web pages out there arguing about the crash, who did what and why. This isn't one of them, and it never will be. Please don't send me theories. This page is about how she lived. |
At the Flame Two summers now the flowers come, the cellophane, the notes, the rain. Strangers kneel who never met you and stand up lighter, and go again. You taught us that a hand held out is worth the whole world's cameras' glare. So here is mine, across an ocean. I hope you know that we're still there. by Lynette Palko, written at the Place de l'Alma, June 1999 |
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