One of my earliest memories is of a hot August day in 1997. I was five years old, anxiously nagging my mom to get out of bed in the middle of the day. Mom had retreated to the cool darkness of her bedroom to grieve the recent death of Princess Diana.

Like many Canadians, I grew up in a royalist family. We ate crumpets on Christmas Day and hot cross buns on Easter. Yet, as an adult, I rarely followed royal affairs. Until the Queen died, and I found myself slipping down a royal rabbit hole of content on another deceased member of the Royal Family—Princess Diana.

I listened to over five hours of a podcast series on her life, got lost in archival images of her (there is endless material since the paparazzi followed her relentlessly), and watched the Diana period of The Crown. I was suddenly obsessed with Princess Diana; at first, I couldn’t understand why. But as I watched interviews of her interspersed with old clips of the national outpour of grief following her death, I realized why—it was making me feel closer to my own dead mom.

It’s how she coyly tightens her mouth into a mischievous smile; her prominent bone structure juxtaposed by the elongated limbs of a former ballet dancer, the blonde hair and blue eyes, and her soft voice. Princess Diana is the closest doppelgänger to my mom. But it wasn’t just her appearance; it was her personality too: underneath her victimhood, there was tenacious willpower and strength, and with such a big heart, she saw the humanity in everyone, no matter where they came from. I realize now why my mom was so attached to Princess Diana—she saw herself in her.

Like my mom did with Princess Diana when I was a kid, I’ve been developing a parasocial relationship with the Princess, but in the form of grief. One of the hardest parts of grieving my mom is not having much evidence of her existence. Because she was disabled, she left no digital footprint. I don’t have any text messages, emails or voicemails (I encourage everyone to not delete voicemails from their parents!). I have a few photos of her, particularly after her brain injury when I was eight, because I was too ashamed of her disability to document our life together. And since it was just her and I, and her parents have since passed away, I have few people with whom I can share memories of her. She feels like a ghost that’s slipping through my fingers with each passing day. The further I get from her death, the less I’m able to imagine her—I’ve lost her voice and her smell, and I can barely see her anymore.

Princess Diana, then, is like a treasure trove of artifacts. With so much visual and auditory evidence, I can create a highly accurate conceptualization of her essence. It’s like I can bring her and, by extension, my mom back to life. In a way, it’s a form of magical thinking, a way to deny that Princess Diana and my mom are not coming back.

In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Prince Harry says he believed for many years after his mom’s death that she was out there somewhere and would show up one day.

“For years, I had dreams. I was convinced that she was still alive. I had to believe she was still alive; I couldn’t face the reality that she was gone. I thought she was taking a break, plotting, planning, to come back and get us.”

Like Prince Harry, I’ve, for many years, held onto the belief that my mom is coming back. My logical brain knows she’s dead—I literally watched her die—but my emotional brain is still in denial. I unlock the front door whenever I come home, hoping she’ll be on the other side. Buying into this fantasy feels much easier than facing reality. And so I find myself getting lost in footage of Princess Diana instead.

My fixation on Princess Diana reveals this innate desire we have to keep the people we’ve lost alive, a yearning to feel physically close to them in the absence of their corporeal body. I envy Prince Harry and all the young people today who have excessive digital evidence of their loved ones’ existence. But I worry that future generations will, like Prince Harry, find it harder to accept people are gone when it’ll be so easy to keep them alive through the endless texts, videos and photos at our fingertips.

The reality is watching footage of Princess Diana will not bring me any closer to my mom than it would bring Prince Harry to his. The only way we can keep our dead mothers alive is by talking about them and our grief. All these years I’ve been looking outside myself for my mom, overlooking the obvious truth that the only physical remnant of her that still exists on this planet is me. I am made up of her cells; she lives on through me, and no photo or video will ever honour her legacy as I can.

Anna Haines is a lifestyle, culture, and travel writer. You can read more of her work on her substack, Best.

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