It was a scene being re-run in a million homes around the State yesterday morning - my husband shouting the news up the stairs: bewilderment, disbelief, shock. Not as shocking, though, as the discovery of a great lump in my throat and foolish tears pricking the back of my eyes when I woke up my daughters and tried to get the words out . . .What was wrong with me? Or with the people in our rural backwater who compared it to the assassination of President Kennedy? Or the tearful woman who insisted that this was exactly how she felt when she heard of Veronica Guerin's death?
What was afflicting this proud Republic of ours when whole townlands - men, women and children - kept the curtains closed, the better to huddle in front of the television and talk in shocked whispers about the soap opera life and senseless death of an exasperating young woman who achieved fame only through the man she married and became more celebrated for her bulimia, suicide attempts, exotic holidays, manipulativeness, psychic consultations and colonic irrigations than anything else? Diana was no icon of mine. I had no hunger for information about her, never devoured Andrew Morton's blockbusters (which allegedly carried Diana's imprimatur), nor bought a magazine simply because her face adorned the cover. We married within a year of each other and have children of roughly similar ages.
Yet I could never begin to understand how other ordinary women could identify with her (as many claimed to), given the virtual reality of her alien world - a world of unimaginable privilege and shameless self-indulgence, a world which, even down among the peasantry, presented itself as a heady mix of fresh paint, flowers and feverish adulation. And yet, somehow, she and I had grown to a point where news of her death could shock me to tears. As I - and many others - fumbled through our psyches for explanations, I suddenly realised that I knew more about Diana, Princess of Wales, than almost any other living person.
Images sprang unbidden of Diana as vibrant, adoring mother of two fine sons; pictures of Diana and the boys laughing on a roller-coaster; pictures of Diana, arms outstretched, swooping down to gather her small sons in her arms; pictures of Diana winning the Mothers' Race at a school open-day; royal pictures undreamt of before Diana, who married into a family where children were never hugged or comforted and affection and appreciation were alien qualities.
So the tears, in great part, were probably for the boys; tears of apprehension for their young lives in the absence of the love, hugs and fun she clearly brought to them. Who, we ask with a shudder, will replace her ? And, as many women - and not a few men - admitted yesterday, the tears also fell for Diana herself, a broken woman for much of her short life. "I've been crying all day", said one of my neighbours. Why? "I think it's because she suffered so much during her life - she suffered enough".
We knew about her suffering. For 16 years we could not avoid her. Without ever buying a book or a magazine, we have lived with her through newspapers and television, absorbed her trials and triumphs almost by osmosis, and thereby grew to know her as one might know a distant, exotic young cousin.
ON Saturday night, at a party, hours before news of her death came through, she was the subject of a prolonged debate. Most of the normal, no-nonsense Irishmen present confessed to being a little in love with her. A few of the woman thought her a touch irritating - "I hate that Queen of Hearts guff and her involvement with that Versace Eurotrash" - but all wished her happiness with Dodi. "She deserves it", said one, summing up. And no one there needed to be told why.
Everyone remembered the first pictures of Charles's fiance, Lady Diana. The endearingly young and gawky child-minder with the tell-tale puppy fat and that awkward loveliness of her; untried innocence clearly in love with her prince.
They remembered how her unbearably smug father - suspected to have been violent towards her mother, who left the home when Diana was hardly five - confirmed to the world that she was indeed a virgin and thus a suitable brood mare for the "Firm". And someone reflected that not a single schoolboy has since come forward even to admit to a chaste, snatched kiss with her behind the bicycle shed during her teenage years. Which of us would not mourn such a loss for a daughter of ours? But even then, she suffered from depression, insecurity and low self-esteem, afflictions which would shadow her all her life.
And along came the Firm, replete with its wealth and palaces and cold, arcane traditions and bogus rituals but lacking even the basic, humane impulse to protect and nurture a gauche, young girl through the intolerable pressures of producing male heirs, perpetuating a monarchy, even learning to live with a virtual menage a trois. Some of us might have disagreed with her very public therapy - the Panorama interview, the visits to Susie Orbach - if only for the sake of her sons. Then again, she was clearly a desperate woman, driven by who knows what demons, real or imagined? The image of Nicholas Soames, one of Charles's inner circle and a government minister at the time of the Panorama interviews, leaps to mind. The reptilian sneer and outright suggestion that Diana was insane went a long way towards proving that not all the young woman's demons were imaginary.
What will the world do without her ? Without the lovely, leggy girl who looked better in a plain white shirt and jeans than any ballgown? Without the 1,000 watt smile to turn the world on to good causes and renew the debates about Diana the heroine versus Diana, cunning self-publicist and all-time media manipulator?
Part of her tragedy is that she had reached a point where she was breaking free at last of the onerous royal burden and embracing the joys of a lustrous, duty-free celebrity. We saw Henry Kissinger gaze down her cleavage, saw her towering over Ralph Lauren, saw Colin Powell ask her out to dance, heard she was taking tea with the Blairs. Who knows what this butterfly might have achieved with her formidable contacts, beauty and compassion? Or would creeping age and cynicism have seen it all come to nothing?
AS women of her generation lose the shine in their hair, wear baggy tracksuits on school runs, make enemies through learning to stand up for themselves and discover the blessed assurance and serenity that growing old should bring, they will wonder what might have become of Diana. Something her brother said yesterday suggested that his sister's life, lived in the media glare, would never be a long and healthy one: "I always believed the press would kill her in the end . . .but even I never envisaged the press would have such a direct hand in her death". It was as though her early death was always inevitable, whether by her own hand or another's.
Suddenly, like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean or John F. Kennedy, Diana in old age is unimaginable. How could she have borne the surrender to gravity, the crow's feet, the thickening waist ? How would her public and the youth-fixated media - so obsessed with physical female perfection that it could never grasp why Charles might prefer the homely Camilla to the coltish Diana - have responded to the slow, cruel corruption of her beauty ? Her looks defined her.
It was said about her that she was "as close to the ideal of contemporary beauty as you can get", and for beauty we know much is forgiven.
But at 36, she was already being described as a "middle-aged woman"; her cellulite was front page news; her newly-rounded stomach became a talking point in recent weeks. Her death has ended the speculation about whether Dodi would marry his princess or revert to form. Would the media have been as interested in a 40-yearold Diana, still single, still yacht-hopping in the Med? And if not, would Diana have learned to live with it ? How would it all have ended for the most sought-after woman in the world, if not in a Paris tunnel?