Mourning for Diana a catharsis for millions

Brace yourselves for the "D" word. Avert your eyes if you must but it needs to be said: let those who would lecture the rest of us for being taken in by the "myth" of Diana, lighten up. People are not so gullible. Nobody I spoke to on the streets of London after her death believed her to be the Immaculate Conception. They were as wise to her frailties as to her goodness and, in fact, were often quicker to acknowledge the first than the second.

Those frailties - and her willingness to talk about them, straight to camera - were what made her "normal". And one other thing before the debate about Diana the Do-Gooder versus Charles the Real Behind the Scenes Do-Gooder, lapses further into some revisionist fudge: it seemed to me that the anti-Charles ire stemmed mainly from the belief that he surrendered to pressure and a moral weakness that almost destroyed Diana. Not only did he agree to marry a naive teenager while in love with somebody else (he admitted this to camera), but showed every intention of pursuing that other relationship.

If the thought does not appall you, imagine a daughter of yours thus betrayed.

The personal is political. The British royal family and those who condescend to the people have yet to learn that lesson. It may be the most enduring legacy of Diana, the People's Princess. It is certainly Mary Robinson's, the People's President.

But perhaps the most surprising outcome of all is the sheer breadth of the issues thrown up by the death of the neurotic, giddy, glamour-puss of a princess: the meaning of privacy; the sins of the media and not just the tabloids (yes, it's our job to be sceptical but has the wittily-expressed sneer become a substitute for fair analysis?); the use and abuse of protocol; the values of the British monarchy; the mysteries of the human psyche; the wisdom of placing mass floral tributes; above all, aspects of public and private grieving in an era when separation and divorce are facts of life.

And this is where even the corgis must have wept for Charles: lambasted as barbaric for taking his children to church within hours of their mother's death; lacerated as a hypocrite for being the one to collect the body in Paris; resented even for participating in the funeral procession as a chief mourner.

But only in a resolutely soulless society could the urge to find solace in church at a time of tragedy be seen as barbaric. In poor, bewildered, stunned Dunblane last year, hundreds of people - many of whom had shaken off organised religion with their nappies - passed entire nights in the churches. And Charles, of all people, has never made a secret of his spiritual core.

As for the Paris trip and his place among the mourners, well, where else would he be? He was the father of her children, after all. But he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't.

It's a dilemma that will find an echo in many an Irish household. Many of us have been to a funeral where protocol demanded that the widow wear black and occupy the front pew though the entire province knew the pair hadn't exchanged a civil word for 20 years.

Most of us now know someone who is separated or divorced. Take the case of the unofficially separated couple with a child of 11 or 12. The husband has recently moved out and is quietly in a new relationship about four months old. The wife remains in the family home with the child. The separation is still a nightmare of murderous recrimination. Then suddenly, the husband dies.

How does the widow handle the funeral? Does she assert herself as a separated woman and abandon their child to sit alone in the front pew? Or does she pose as chief mourner for the child's sake and risk being branded a hypocrite?

And what choice have the sympathisers then but to bypass the man's grieving parents and siblings to shake hands in a haze of stultifying embarrassment with a woman who everyone knows would cheerfully have poisoned him had the drink not got there first?

And where stands the new girlfriend in all this? Should she have the status due a bereaved partner? Is four months long enough to earn it or should it be a year, two years, four years?

Take another case: the childless woman who years ago initiated a separation, inspiring life-long enmity in the man's family. By definition, she has sweet memories of some good times. The funeral is in the church where they married.

She goes along, her heart leaden with conflicting emotions - sadness, affection, guilt, regret, the old despairing sense of loss and what-might-have-been rekindled. But all she gets are baleful looks from his siblings across the aisle and a shifty air among mutual friends who clearly haven't a clue how to - or even whether to - approach her. It is one of life's great dilemmas. How or when does forgiveness or closure come about in this, the most fraught area of human relationships? In the days when the wake at home was a normal ritual of death, such issues might have been fought over and ironed out over a drink or two.

What chance have we now when, increasingly, the body is kept at arm's length in a funeral "home" and grieving - like much else - has become a purely private matter?

What made Diana's death different was that while people everywhere, including grown men, of every creed, intellect and colour, sobbed openly, many admitted they had no idea why they sobbed. What made the massive funeral crowd in Hyde Park so remarkable was not just this emotional nakedness but the number who appeared to experience a genuine catharsis of some kind, who said afterwards, somewhat puzzled, that they felt a deep sense of peace.

Many of those mourners had the wit to know that some of the tears were for Diana but were mostly for themselves, tears long-repressed for lost, dead loves and other tragedies. Emotion feels good. Aristotle knew that when he wrote of the nature of tragedy as both trauma and catharsis, pain and purification. Shared emotion feels even better. This loss of ego in the collective is behind the power of mass events from rock concerts to the Nuremberg rallies.

The last time these same questions were bandied around about communal emotion in an Irish context was when even the most sports-illiterate of us were amazed to find ourselves on the exultant march with Jackie's Army. It felt great, that was why.

Why, then, is emotion considered such an alien concept and stoicism such a virtue? Why, say, in an office setting, is a bout of tears seen as an embarrassing, unprofessional occurrence (and mostly female) but an outburst of anger as normal, acceptable (and, as it happens, mostly male and misdirected)?

Diana's life reflected the dominance of the heart - and the world loved her for it. Will the extraordinary events around her death teach us anything? And might those who accuse us of being suckered by a myth have the humility sometime to admit that they missed the point by a mile?