Lady Die
Greetings from The Rough™
There are certain women throughout history who captivate both heart and spirit. They radiate a power so visceral that it almost explains the many men who have foolishly fallen victim to muses. I remember exactly where I was the day Diana Spencer died. Everything felt rainy, not only in a tragic, gloomy sense, but in a way that seemed to mirror her homeland. Her presence was everywhere, as though the world had been lowered into a cathedral of morbid elegance. That was the day I first believed there is no weapon more powerful than the destruction of beauty.
I saw doves flying toward golden light, only to be shot down within view. I saw baby blue and royal purple dresses turning into museum artifacts. I overheard women debating what shade of lipstick she would wear in her casket. Death and glamour, intertwined and lit like a flame that has never quite burned out. Most of all, I remember the palace gates buried beneath flowers, packages, poems, lyrics, letters, chocolates, posters, and photographs. A pastel field of broken hearts. Delicate gifts offered as sigils of love. Young women, mostly anonymous, faces open with grief, placing tributes as if the princess were their sister.
Through those scenes, I began to feel that something in our world was deeply wrong. She nearly did not receive a royal funeral, and yet the public pushback was immediate and fierce. Even now, there are those who cannot understand the magnitude of the mourning. Why her, when so many die every day? Perhaps it was nothing more than the perfect storm of tragic grace and collective hysteria. But something shifted. The zeitgeist moved, irreversibly. We do not control the levers of paradigm, we are simply carried when one is pulled. Diana had become attached to one of those levers. To many, she embodied a vision of how things might be; a fairy tale illuminated just enough to conceal its dungeons. And when her underworld surfaced, when the secrets loosened their grip, it still felt as though the darkest truths vanished like a small white car disappearing into the night. And that is why she died when she did.
Four months later, my aunt, who rarely left her home, appeared like clockwork with a gift. It was an unusually warm December day, sun-drenched and almost springlike. The light caught her slick black hair and turned the porch gold. Without a word, she placed a Princess Diana Beanie Baby into my hands. The tag read Princess™. It was purple, adorned with a single white rose: an echo of the thousands pressed against iron gates. A trinket born from tragedy, and somehow, it felt infinite and inevitable to me. As though beauty is designed to die young, though we are never told why. You do not question the divine, you swallow it. You hold back tears because the grief does not feel like it belongs to you, and yet it settles there anyway. A beautiful teardrop suspended inside the heart. Over time, it crystallizes and becomes your diamond in the rough.
Werner Herzog tells this story: When Princess Di died, there were two men in the car as well that also died. Herzog was at the Telluride film festival when it happened. He was talking to a friend who was commenting that no one was also mourning the two other men that died.
That friend had a long time girlfriend who overheard this conversation, and broke up with him on the spot.
It's in Herzog's book on Truth.