DETROIT – Within an hour after the death of Queen Elizabeth II had been announced, I popped into a drugstore to buy a couple cards. The news was on in the background, and the clerk, a middle-aged woman whom I had never met before, looked at me.
“That’s so sad. I guess Charles might be okay, but I will never forgive that Camilla for how she did Diana that way,” she said. That clerk had never been to England; when I asked what she thought of Liz Truss or Boris Johnson, I received a blank stare.
But she took it for granted that I knew about the royals — and of course, she was right. We all did. What I had to think about, however, is why they mattered so much, especially here.
Had we not won our independence in a bloody war against the Queen’s great-great-great grandfather, King George III? Did we not have to fight a second war against Great Britain a generation later?
Yes, we learned all that in school. Yet for us now-aging baby boomers, that seemed almost as remote as the Sumerians and Hittites. Britain was the cherubic Winston Churchill, with his cigar and fingers flashing V-for-victory, beating the Nazis with us.
And it was Queen Elizabeth. She was always there.
To put it in a personal note: I am 70, which the brilliant Leonard Cohen described as “the foothills of old age.” I have lived through the administrations of 14 Presidents of the United States.
Empires have shrunk (the British) and collapsed (the Soviet Union) in my lifetime. But Elizabeth was always there. She became Queen two months before I was born. Churchill was still Prime Minister; Harry Truman was in the White House, and the tyrant Joseph Stalin still ruled the vast Soviet Union.
Television was barely becoming established; Britain was a smoky country heated by coal, and much of Europe was still largely in ruins from World War II. A middle-aged Soviet woman whose little boy had starved to death during the siege of Leningrad had just gotten pregnant with a child she would name Vladimir Putin.
The Beatles weren’t even teenagers.
The United States, and the world, had less than half the population they do now. I don’t know when I first knew about Queen Elizabeth, though I remember being surprised as a small child that she was pretty and young, not old and stern, as I imagined queens.
I have spent most my life as a journalist, and have met five Presidents, and boatloads of other celebrities. I respected and admired many of them, but got over being star-struck long ago.
Yet here’s a confession: I once had a chance to meet Queen Elizabeth, but was too shy to do so. Forty years ago, she came to Ottawa for ceremonies marking the end of Britain’s ability to amend the Constitution of Canada. I was there to cover it, and there was an opportunity for reporters to meet the Queen.
I was too self-conscious to do so (she’s the Queen! My suit isn’t nice enough!) and passed, which I soon regretted. I did see her, more than once, and once I think she looked in my direction, and smiled.
My fear, of course, was silly. Though the tragic Diana would be called “the people’s princess,” in a very real sense, Elizabeth was both Britain and the world’s queen. When she died, a CNN reporter went to Buckingham Palace and interviewed three working-class people who were standing outside to pay their respects.
He asked them something like, “Does it seem strange to have such grief for someone you never met?” To his surprise, it turned out that they had all met her, some multiple times.
She had come to the day care center where one woman worked, and to a construction site and met another of the mourners; one had met her three or four times. She knew the importance of being an example, standing above it all and yet having the common touch.
Only once did she badly miscalculate, when Princess Diana died, and she seemed cold and uncaring, but, with the help of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, recovered from that misstep too.
Who among us hasn’t been upset by family troubles? That episode may, in the long run, have made her seem more human.
I used to say, only partly in jest, that what America needed was a large dysfunctional royal family, so that we could obsess over them and leave the politicians to do their jobs. Indeed, until the bizarre Boris Johnson, the British press normally paid scant attention to the family life of their prime ministers, and swarmed over the royals.
They indeed provided plenty of tabloid copy — except for the Queen. Those who really knew her said she had a strong sense of religious duty to her job, and that she felt an obligation to serve for life and uphold tradition and set an example, and she did indeed.
Winston Churchill, who she once said taught her how to be a queen, said that in times when things looked blackest, one has the duty to KBO –‘keep buggering on.’ That would have been too inelegant for Queen Elizabeth. But that’s exactly what she did.
And her nation and the world, in my view, were the better for it.
Photo by Chris Jackson | Credit: POOL/AFP via Getty Images
