It doesn't take a lot of time to make a huge impact, Diana did it in sixteen short years.
Thinking back about the enormous impact that Diana, Princess of Wales had on the entire world is staggering. I don’t think there are very many people twenty years and older who don’t know about the “People’s Princess.” We all know her face, we know how she was one of the first people to remove the stigma surrounding people who were living with aids. Long before Angelina put herself in harms way there was Diana. She didn’t need to bring awareness to the remaining minefields and the dangers they presented to the people in those regions, she was after all royalty, she was already “enough.” Yet she went out and did things that were “above her pay-grade” as it were. I didn’t get the sense that Diana made that marriage simply for the material gains, or the fame. It seems to me, an outsider, as she got deeper down the royal rabbit hole that she decided to use her prominence to make a difference in her/our world, and to shed light on causes, people who needed a voice.
She was iconic. Not only for her heart, but also her fashion. She alone saved the British monarchy, in my humble opinion. She returned them to relevance and importance. She gave them their heir in William, and their spirited mini version of her compassionate self in Harry. For somebody who wasn’t in the global limelight for very long, she was twenty when she wed Charles, and only thirty-six when she died…take that in. She was only “Princess Diana” for sixteen short years, and yet she had a profound impact on the world. Twenty years later she continues to bring about change. Her sons are a shining example of her heart; how deeply she loved them, how much affection, energy and soul she poured into them. As a mother my heart aches, and has done so since the day I heard that she had been killed, for her two sons. How tragic that William and Kate’s beautiful children will never know her. Not in the flesh anyway, they will know her in a round about way, through their father, and their uncle because her goodness is embedded into them. I look forward to the next twenty years of witnessing the incredible work that her sons will carry out in her honour.
RIP lovely Diana, since you never were left in peace from the day your engagement to Charles was announced.
I leave you with Elton John’s Goodbye England’s Rose (Candle in the Wind) that he rewrote for her. The lyrics and photos brought me to tears. I don’t even know if Elton really had any idea how much we’d still be pining for Diana twenty years after he re-wrote this song in her honour.
The thing about all of this that makes me go “hmmm” is how can the world be so cruel, taking away a human being like Diana and leaving us with one like Donald Trump???
