North Star Writers Group

Lest we suffer from Paris Hilton withdrawal, the media stand ready to provide a new celebrity fix, so be prepared, and accept my apologies for contributing to the torrent. Starting July 1 with a concert in London to mark what would have been her 46^th birthday, through the 10^th anniversary of her Aug. 31, 1997 death, we may well be treated, if that is the right word, to a nonstop recap of the storied life and tragic end of yet another blonde.

Lady Diana Spencer, her name and title before her 1981 marriage to the heir to the British throne, was no saint, although she did lend her name and aura to some worthy causes. The word that describes her best is vulnerable. Before she became engaged to Prince Charles, Lady Diana had no experience of the frenzied media pack-hounds that have always preyed on British royalty, sniffing desperately for any morsel of juicy news that would fetch large sums from a tabloid. She was the proverbial babe in the woods.

After Lady Diana became Princess Diana, she remained vulnerable because she was an outsider to the royal family, one her husband never really loved. Too busy having phone sex with Camilla, Prince Charles did not seem to have interceded on his wife’s behalf to insist that she be treated with respect and dignity by the ossified staff of royal administrators and courtiers. So they chewed her up and spat her out to bleed in full view.

Even as Princess of Wales, Diana initially was at a loss to find her place in the palace pantheon, growing slowly, painfully and very publicly into her role without much apparent support or guidance from her new family on how to define or fulfill said role. She was vulnerable because she had to sort that out pretty much on her own, in all her isolation and emotional immaturity. Cast into the royal fishbowl, she damn near drowned before she learned to swim. “The Princess of Wails,” one newspaper dubbed her early in her marriage.

Yet she had an ace up her designer sleeve. Unlike the stiff, formal and unexpressive Windsors, Princess Diana easily touched people’s hearts. She wasn’t feigning or condescending when she reached out to shake hands and speak with on-lookers during royal visits and tours. By the simple act of cradling an AIDS-ridden child in her arms, Princess Diana helped make what was then a mystery ailment an acceptable topic for discussion back in the 1980s, when the disease was still ignored if not downright taboo. She also took on land mines, campaigning vigorously to achieve a worldwide ban (which the United States refuses to sign to this day).

Almost as much as her beauty, her vulnerability touched us because it reassured us that she cared, that she kept her heart in that rare atmosphere of royalty. As noted by that most English of poets, William Shakespeare, “They do not love who do not show their love.” Photos and film depict Princess Diana greeting her two sons with all the open, unaffected feeling a mother can muster. She’s delighted to see them again and lets them know it with her smiles, kisses and tight hugs. Don’t we all crave that kind of affection and support in our lives? No matter what else may have been going on around them, those two boys knew without a doubt that their Mummy loved them.

Princess Diana also formed a bond with the most unlikely of people – Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize-winning nun who nurtured children in the slums of Calcutta. What a contrast. Mother Theresa often admonished her audiences, “Give until it hurts.” That’s not exactly a welcome message to most people, whose lives are already full of enough pain. Princess Diana, however, never stopped looking like she could really use a hug, a cup of tea, and an encouraging pat on the shoulder. Most of us could use the same ourselves.

The saint died six days after the princess, and many pundits point to the relative lack of attention Mother Teresa’s passing received as proof that something is truly amiss with our priorities. It wasn’t so much that as it was our inability to identify with a seemingly perfect, invulnerable person who didn’t appear to need anything from us except money to continue her work. The princess always felt so much more welcoming.

And although frequently in pain and vulnerable, Princess Diana and her world of pomp and privilege offered some of us a fleeting chance to exchange our ordinary existence for the fantasy veneer of glamour.

But we all came crashing back to reality the day the princess – and the fairy tale – died.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column #CT041. Request permission to publish here.