FAREWELL, DIANA

By Paul Gray

Her final ceremonial progression through the streets of London raised haunting memories of her first, on a brilliant morning 16 summers ago. That was when a watching world fell in love with the beautiful princess, her new husband by her side, being borne in a carriage toward an enchanted future. Her return journey last Saturday morning carried her, alone, moment by moment, step by cadenced step, inexorably into the past.

In one sense, though, Diana, Princess of Wales, was not gone. The day before she was blessed and buried, her former mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, made a rare, hastily arranged televised statement putting, after days of puzzling silence, the royal seal on the pain that so many ordinary people had already registered so sharply: "No one who knew Diana will ever forget her," the Queen said, looking directly into the camera lens. "Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her."

Nor, in a similar way, was Princess Diana alone during her final public appearance. She was joined by more than a million people in central London who lined the route of her funeral procession; by the 2,000 mourners inside Westminster Abbey who had been invited to attend her funeral service. Tens of thousands more gathered along roadsides to say farewell as she was driven roughly 70 miles northwest of London to Althorp, her family's ancestral home. And across the earth's 24 time zones, hundreds of millions interrupted their waking or sleeping schedules to gather around television sets.

The pictures they received were arresting and regularly heartbreaking: the pomp, circumstance and pageantry so characteristic of the historic solemnities staged by the British monarchy, but with a contemporary difference, both hip and humanizing, that marked Diana's singular imprint on the House of Windsor and on the world's notion of royal behavior.

Even her coffin captured this mixture of the traditional and the personal. It was draped with the royal standard; on top of that rested a spray of white lilies, Diana's favorite flower. And there was something else: a bouquet of white tulips from Prince William and a wreath of white roses with a card bearing the handwritten word Mummy from Prince Harry.

Diana's cortege was joined along the way by five of the men in her life: her ex-husband and former father-in-law, Prince Charles and Prince Philip; her brother Charles, Earl Spencer; and her two sons, Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, who will turn 13 next week. They walked behind her coffin, and then so did five representatives from each of the 110 charities with which Diana had been associated. A few were in wheelchairs, a few more on crutches. They were not the sort of people ordinarily invited to march in royal processions, but they were Diana's people.

So were the glittering guests lining up outside Westminster Abbey, waiting to get in. The spectators looking on, many of whom had camped out at this prized location for two days and nights, quietly applauded the celebrities they spotted, among them Tom Hanks, Luciano Pavarotti and Diana Ross.

The coffin, borne by eight members of the red-coated Welsh Guards, entered the abbey just as nearby Big Ben tolled out 11 a.m. Inside, the soaring Gothic arches were bathed in sunlight streaming through the abbey's windows. Patterns of stained glass shimmered on stone. The dreaded but inevitable moment of formal leave taking had arrived.

The service, which was broadcast outside over loudspeakers and on three mammoth television screens that had been erected in Hyde and Regent's parks, lasted just over an hour. It demonstrated again the soothing, cathartic power of ritual, the way in which ceremony can provide a shared context for personal grief. There were two dramatic diversions from the normal order of things. First, Elton John sang Candle in the Wind, a song he had originally written to celebrate Marilyn Monroe, with the lyrics revised to honor his friend Diana. A number of people had questioned the propriety of a rock star's performing in Westminster Abbey. But when John, accompanying himself on the piano, began singing the words "Goodbye, England's rose," guests inside the abbey seemed caught up in music and message. Prince Harry, who like his brother had kept his composure while walking behind their mother's casket, buried his face in his hands and sobbed during the song. Outside, people held candles, their flames flickering in the wind.

Then Diana's brother delivered a remarkably personal and pointed tribute. He renewed the denunciation of the press's invasive pursuit of his sister that he had first uttered after learning of Diana's death: "I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling. My own, and only, explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum." The earl said there is no need to "canonize" his sister's memory and acknowledged her flawed humanity: "For all the status, the glamour, the applause, Diana remained throughout a very insecure person at heart, almost childlike in her desire to do good for others so she could release herself from deep feelings of unworthiness, of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom." But he also described his sister as "someone with a natural nobility who was classless, who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic." That statement raised some eyebrows because it seemed to refer directly to Queen Elizabeth, sitting nearby, who had seen to it that the appellation Her Royal Highness was taken from Diana when she was divorced last year from Prince Charles. When Earl Spencer concluded his tribute, applause could be heard outside the abbey. Those inside at the rear then began clapping, and the tide of approval swept forward toward Diana's coffin. Services in Westminster Abbey are not supposed to generate applause.

But then so much of what happened on Saturday, and during the six days of mourning that led up to it, seemed unprecedented. At one point British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "It is something more profound than anything I can remember in the totality of my life." Many people might disagree with that sentiment, but few could doubt that something remarkable was going on.

But what was it that everyone had seen? On this score, opinions veered dramatically. Some saw a princess martyred by publicity, hounded unto death by the cameras that loved her so and that then feasted on her funeral. Others blamed the family that drew her into its royal orbit, expecting her to glow with the pale fire of reflected glory, and later cast her aside when she blazed forth as a star.

Or perhaps the whole week of lamentation was an electronically stimulated hysteria, an ersatz binge catered by press and television barons that will be followed some morning soon by a massive letdown and hangover. Or again, maybe Diana's too brief life and meteoric streak across the world's consciousness enraptured people by its mythic qualities. A ballet shoe tied last week to the railing outside Kensington Palace was inscribed, "You were a Cinderella at the Ball and now you are a Sleeping Beauty."

These simple words capture an essence of Diana's extraordinary appeal. Men were swayed by her poise and beauty, but her hold on women was stronger still. For all her modernity, Diana was a living embodiment of an atavistic, patriarchal fact of life. Women marry up. Little boys don't dream of becoming princes, because they either are such by birth or are not. But little girls are still taught to dream that someday their prince will come and take them away to the castle. Grown women, no matter how bruised by reality, remember those romantic dreams.

Diana lived them. Her prince really came. She grew famous beyond measure, bore two healthy sons and acquired a regal platform for her generous heart. For all the opprobrium heaped last week by Diana's admirers on the chilly Windsors, she would have been invisible without them. The lonely youngest daughter of divorced parents, she translated her own pain not into bitterness and withdrawal but into a genuine desire to comfort the suffering of others--people afflicted with AIDS and leprosy and breast cancer, the mutilated victims of land mines. She could have done far worse with her fortune and acquired fame.

But then she and her prince went their separate ways, and her story grew more fascinating still. Diana alone became a work in progress, an inspiration to every woman anywhere who faced the trauma and challenge of sudden independence. Even those--men as well as women--who did not follow her every zig and zag over the past few years found themselves weeping last week. We have some sense of what she was, but we will never know what she might have become.

--With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand/Westminster Abbey

With reporting by BARRY HILLENBRAND/WESTMINSTER ABBEY