Decade on:

Has it been 10 years already since Diana died? So it seems, and the best evidence isn’t the calendar. It’s the photographs of Diana, Princess of Wales, staring out at us from the newsstands and the Web and the television. They remind us how distant the near-past can seem, how sensitive we are to the nuances of the present. That, perhaps, is one of the ways to tell Diana’s story — a shimmering wisp of the present who chose to be wedded to an institution that embodied the past. The fact is that she was an imperfect human being, like all of us, who married into a family of imperfect beings. She died in an accident that was as tragic as any accident in which a young mother dies.

In the decade since, the only thing that remains open-ended is the reaction to her death. From a decade’s distance, there is something a little incommensurate in that great global throb of grief. The temptation is to search Diana’s nature, her character, her actions, for the source of it. But all that does, from this distance, is reinforce the sense of something disproportionate. Perhaps the answer is no more complicated than this: the world is filled with so much to grieve over that grief itself seems incommensurate and indulgent. It is no slight to that young woman to say that in her death we recognised something our grief was good for.