Princess Diana, My Sister and the Mystery

The Crown makes me wonder about life and death.

I thought I’d be publishing something about the Jesuit vow of poverty today. But I’ve found myself transfixed by the first episodes of the final season of The Crown, which dropped this week. They concern the last two months of the life of Diana, Princess of Wales.

I don’t have any memory of Diana’s death, which has always puzzled me a bit. Until The Crown I’ve never spent any time thinking about the Royal Family, but still, that was one of those Moments that everyone remembers.

But then I realized where I was at the time. And the gap made sense.

PINE RIDGE

In August of 1997, I had just begun work on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The Jesuits were invited by the Lakota leader Chief Red Cloud to come and start a school there some one hundred years ago, and so they began a school in his name.

I spent 5 months at that school in the spring of 1994 as the final part of my initial seminary training, a program called “long experiment.” And three years later I had returned to spend three years teaching high school English.