In Diana's short span of years she showed a sweet innocence at first, later becoming knowledgeable, a strong, self-defining woman, a liberated soul, searching, feeling, compassionate and graceful, afraid at first about pulling up the roots that had strangled her happiness, but finally severing their ugly reach. Di's adoring public embraced her with a shower of affection that bespoke their identification with those values she embodied.

Priggish royalty, on the other hand, with its male-line dominance has received a well-deserved black eye. Critics are continuing to mumble "A pox on the House of Windsor." TV news reports recapped Diana's warmth as she waxed intimate with people with AIDS. Her willingness to touch fellow human beings was behavior that sharply contrasted with the antiseptic white gloves ("almost never removed") worn by Queen Elizabeth.

The tragedy of Diana's sudden death is poignant because she'd only recently found herself beginning to enjoy the fruits of self-assertion. While experiencing her first real taste of personal freedom and of friendship with an adoring male, she was struck down. But the spirit of Diana can be called dead only if the spirit of Integrity that used her so wisely is dead. Those honoring her memory by keeping her values alive, predict she's due to become a kind of living presence in Western culture, not unlike that presence Buddhists call Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion.

She went too to the front lines in Bosnia to comfort little children whose limbs had been blown off by land mines. The elimination of such mines, spread worldwide by money-mad murderers, both armament and government goons, concerned her greatly.

But her finest legacy, perhaps, was her refusal to live a life of royal unhappiness, her throwing off of heartless aristocratic chains, her assertion of her own independence as a person, her refusal to be a pawn.

By doing this she effectively critiqued--in a way no political theorist could match--the purposes behind the flatulent facade of the monarchy with its unconvincing, faded "family values."

Diana was not just gay-friendly, she was people-friendly, something of an anomaly in stuffy English culture. She was beautiful not because she wore the "right" clothes, or traveled in the "right" circles, but because her ready smile reflected a magnificent inner self housing a compassionate wellspring of genuine human feelings.