A few weeks ago, the local theater ran Marie Antoinette and The Queen back to back, in an apt if short-lived theme. I was sorry to miss Marie Antoinette because our book club just read it, and I had been fascinated by the sophisticated and scurrilous media coverage of the French court, as well as the performance-art aspect of their lives (among other things, the fact that the public was invited to watch them eat).

I did catch The Queen, though, which is up for several Oscars, and despite the narrow scope of the story, I found it strangely entertaining. The film details the few weeks directly after Princess Diana’s death, when the monarchy lost favor with the public due to its tepid response. Helen Mirren is not very like Queen Elizabeth physically, but she was effective portraying someone who is not just clinging to the past, but genuinely horrified by all the false sentiment courted by Diana in her life and lavished upon her after her death. In the latter respect, Husband and I found ourselves firmly on the side of the queen, and we were rooting for her to stick to her guns and refuse to add anything to the funeral circus. Alas, she caved, and the British monarchy lived to see another day.

I remember Diana’s death very well. Just before her accident, I had been traveling around Indonesia. I was staying with friends in Surabaya when I got an e-mail from home informing me that my younger cousin had been killed in a plane crash, along with one of her friends. It was a sightseeing flight in a beach town. Her family was crushed. Due to the time change and the length of the flight, I wouldn’t be able to make it back in time for her funeral.

I flew to Bali, from which my departing flight was scheduled to leave, and hung around the beach by myself for a few days just waiting to go home. It was paradise, but I didn’t enjoy it. On my last evening, I got sick and developed a fever, something that has happened to me rarely as an adult. I couldn’t sleep, so I just stayed up most of the night watching CNN. At some point I heard the news of Diana’s crash. By the time my plane took off, I had not yet heard the outcome, but when I got to Los Angeles I remember seeing a Time magazine with her picture on the cover, announcing her death.

When I got back to Chicago, I was stunned to see the amount of media attention devoted to her death. I had thought it would have blown over in the time it took for me to fly back and recover from jet lag, but it didn’t. At the time I lived half a block from the Wrigley Building, where people who were waiting in line to sign a memorial book had set up a spontaneous makeshift memorial with candles, balloons, and other tributes. I think that surprised me more than anything else–that people in the Heartland, USA, would wait in line to sign a book that no one would see, for a woman that none of them knew.

I was appalled, actually, by the ostentatious grieving that the general public seemed almost to enjoy, especially in contrast to the real mourning that my aunt and her family were doing. I had never been a huge fan of Diana, who in my opinion played the victim card a little too often for someone so privileged. I felt a little bit of sympathy for her youthful mistake in selling herself in the royal marriage market–why didn’t her friends and family try to talk her out of it?–but she was, nominally, an adult when she did it, and unlike Marie Antoinette she did have a choice about it. She had endless resources to make something of her life, in spite of her lackluster marriage and dreadful in-laws, and I didn’t find her subsequent choices especially heroic.

On the other hand…I thought if my aunt was going to be in mourning, it was fitting that the rest of the world should mourn alongside her, if not with her. And, who knows–maybe all those hysterical people waiting in line at the Wrigley building were secretly grieving their own losses.