Copyright 2001, Colin C. Tipping

Good-bye England’s Rose
I began this book with a story about my sister Jill. The
purpose of it was to illustrate how a seemingly des-
perate situation can be transformed when we approach
it from the standpoint of Radical Forgiveness.
Just a few days before going to print, fate handed me
an opportunity to end the book with a story that was
equally instructive and open to a Radical Forgiveness
perspective.
Unlike the one about Jill, this story was one with which
virtually everyone in the world was familiar, as well as
deeply involved emotionally. I refer of course to the
story of Princess Diana who made her unexpected
transition in the early hours of Sunday, August 31,
1997.
The drama began for me when my lifetime friend, Pe-
ter Jollyman, woke me with a phone call from England.
For him it was around midday, but for me in Atlanta, it
was still early and I had not yet seen a newspaper or
listened to the radio. “Have you heard about the acci-
dent?” he asked. “What accident?” I replied, still in a
stupor but aware enough to realize this had to be seri-
ous for him to be calling like this. “Princess Di was
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killed last night in a car crash in Paris. She was being
chased by paparazzi. Her car spun out of control and
hit a concrete post. She and Dodi were killed.”
I noticed a perfunctory pang of remorse pass through
me as I listened to the details as best he knew them at
the time, but I can’t say that it lasted more than a few
moments. I tried to sound suitably shocked, but I re-
ally felt somewhat ambivalent about it.
Lots of people died in the last twenty-four hours, I
thought, after I put the phone down. Why would her
death be any more, or any less, tragic than anyone
else’s? It was her time to go, and that’s about all there
is to it. Sad for her two boys though, of course. With
that, I went downstairs to make tea and fix breakfast.
Then I turned on the TV and from that moment on,
slowly began to get drawn into, and involved with, what
was to become, in the days culminating in her funeral
on Saturday morning, a roller-coaster of emotion.
As the days went by, I realized that something quite
extraordinary was going on. The reaction to Princess
Diana’s death, not only in England but throughout the
world, was truly phenomenal. As I saw my country-
men on the TV in heartfelt pain, crying and grieving
in public — something English people simply do not
do ordinarily — I found myself feeling the same emo-
tions and crying with them. I was shocked to realize
that I was hurting too. Somehow this woman, whom I
had never met or thought much about, especially dur-
ing the thirteen years I have lived in the U.S., had
touched me deeply. I felt the loss profoundly, and I
was very surprised.
I really began to pay attention and to wonder what was
really happening here. Something of extraordinarily
deep significance was occurring, and I began an in-
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ner search to find the message and the meaning in it.
Diana’s death clearly had meaning far beyond the ap-
parent circumstances in which it occurred, dramatic
as they appeared to be. Some higher purpose was