Like many women of my generation, I count the 1981 wedding of Diana and Charles as one of my most vivid early memories. I was 5 when it occurred, and I rose at dawn to watch it on a black-and-white television with my family. I was so captivated by the grandeur — the billowing dress with its 25-foot train, the horse-drawn carriage, the kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace — that I asked my parents what steps I myself might take in order to marry a prince. It wouldn’t be possible, they informed me, because we weren’t Episcopalians. It seems, in retrospect, strangely evasive of my mother and father to imply that religion was all that stood between me and the British throne, but maybe I was lucky to have my dreams quashed so early. Apparently, the experience of watching that royal wedding at a formative age is now routinely blamed for turning countless little girls into adult Bridezillas.

Sixteen years later, after Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris, I rose again at dawn to watch her funeral. I had graduated from college a few months earlier and was interning as a reporter in North Carolina, working a 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. shift. In the days and weeks that followed the funeral, I’d drive around a city I didn’t really know in a newly acquired secondhand car, and whenever “Candle in the Wind 1997” came on the radio, which was approximately every 10 minutes, I’d burst into tears. I have, of course, heard the argument that the death of a pampered, neurotic woman famous for being pretty as much as for anything else was not exactly tragic — but isn’t there room in the world for many kinds of tragedies?