🕯️ 31 August 1997 – a day so many have never forgotten
Some news stays with you for the rest of your life. Even decades later, you can still remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard it.
For so many people, the death of Princess Diana was one of those moments.
It was Sunday morning, 31 August 1997. The news from Paris travelled around the world: Diana had died. She was just 36 years old.
Those who remember that time will probably remember the television images from the days that followed. The crowds outside Kensington Palace. The flowers that grew into an extraordinary sea of colour. The handwritten cards and candles. The strange sense of silence and disbelief that seemed to hang over London.
And perhaps most of all, that difficult-to-explain feeling of having lost someone most of us had never met, yet somehow felt we knew.
Diana had been part of our lives for years. We had watched her wedding, watched her sons grow up, seen the grand occasions and the beautiful gowns – and, eventually, we had also begun to see the cracks behind the fairy tale.
Perhaps that was part of the reason her death affected so many people so deeply.
Because behind “Lady Di”, behind the most photographed woman in the world and all the splendour of royal life, we had come to see a real person: vulnerable, sometimes uncertain, sometimes rebellious – and with a warmth that seemed to shine most brightly when she was with people whom others so often overlooked.
Twenty-nine years have passed since that late summer day.
There is now an entire generation for whom 31 August 1997 is something they know only from photographs, television footage and the stories of those who remember it. And yet, for those who lived through those years, sometimes all it takes is a single photograph of Diana and, for a moment, it feels as though a little piece of that time has returned.
Perhaps that is what remembrance is.
The years pass, the world changes and people leave us – but some of them never quite leave our memories.
In memory of Diana, Princess of Wales
1 July 1961 – 31 August 1997 🕯️
1
