Do you remember where you were the day Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in that car crash with Dodi Al-Fayed in a Paris tunnel in 1997? I remember it clearly. It was a Sunday morning in Australia and I had heard that she was seriously injured in that crash, only to be rung about 4 hours later by a friend to be told ever so bluntly “Diana’s dead!”
Mohammed Al-Fayed, father of Diana’s lover Dodi, remembers all too vividly, and has been obsessed with the event ever since. Today saw the verdict into the 6 month inquest into allegations by Mr. Al-Fayed that the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, had Diana assasinated. It found no evidence for Mr.Al-Fayed’s claims.
Now we all know that the royal family had no time for Diana. We saw in the movie, “The Queen”, how Queen Elizabeth II – played superbly by Dame Helen Mirren – struggled with being human and not royal in such an extraordinary event, and we have also laughed at the bad taste side of it when we heard the joke: “What did the Queen give Sarah Ferguson (Prince Andrew’s then wife) for Christmas? A ticket to Paris and a Mercedes Benz.” But to pursue a line as far fetched as saying that Diana was assassinated by the secret intelligence service (MI6) on the orders of the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Philip), is entering the world of obsession, and a failure on Mr. Al-Fayed’s part to ‘let go’.
Sister Helen Prejean, author of the book, “Dead Man Walking”, and a fierce advocate against capital punishment, detailed in an interview once the story of a father whose child was the victim of a brutal killing. The father wanted to watch his child’s killer die, to be executed, and he wanted a front row seat. After it was over, the father complained that the execution was way too quick and that he should have been made to suffer more. Or the case that was closest to her heart; the basis of the book and movie of the same name. She talks of the mother of the girl who was brutally raped and killed:
“ She has lost the personal universe of her child that can never be replaced and she cannot stand the thought that he could be alive. I understand that with her loss that she would say something like that. I personally believe that they could have watched his death a thousand times, but that vacuum and the loss that they have sustained could never be filled by the death of another person.”
Same too with Mr. Al-Fayed. What if they did find in his favour, and say that the Duke of Edinburgh was responsible for the ‘hit’. Would Mr. Al-Fayed be any happier? No. He lost his son; his heir. As a muslim, a son is as dear to a father as mother’s milk is to a baby. He would not have been any more content than he is now. He is in pain, and pain causes us to obsess, to relive, to regurgitate, to live in a state where there is only a brick wall in front of us.
We wonder why victim’s families forgive their children’s killers. They do it because they want to live, to move on, to free their soul. They don’t want to be trapped in that continuous cycle of hatred, depression, loss, and pure grief for the rest of their lives.
Maybe it’s time Mohammed Al-Fayed freed his soul. Enjoy your day.
