The Princess Diana Experience
- May 21, 2021
- 4 min read
by Becky Robison
The Parisian hospital looked like every other hospital—gray and grayer, boring if it weren’t for the flashes of emergency red. Quiet, frantic voices, only here they were a mess of vowels and phlegmy R’s. Constant anxious beeping. My brain fogged with jetlag. They’d thrown me on a plane, then a helicopter, no time even to pack. Their only explanation: your mother. But Mom had gone on vacation to England, not to France.
The woman who finally approached me, clipboard in hand, wasn’t French. “Are you Diana Simmons, daughter of Pamela Simmons?”
I’d barely nodded before she told me that my mother hadn’t made it. “Could you please sign here to claim responsibility for the body?”
I couldn’t cry, not there. The fluorescent lights were hideous, the signs were in a foreign language. This woman was talking about Mom as if she were a piece of lost luggage. “What do you mean she didn’t make it?”
The woman was still holding the clipboard out to me—her nails painted pale pink, wearing a slightly wrinkled suit that matched the gray of the hospital walls, her thick braids twisted back into a bun. Her face was twisted too, in impatience. It was late—she didn’t have time for a grieving daughter. As though I had any idea they were bringing me here to grieve.
“Your mother is dead,” she said. Then, as an afterthought: “I’m sorry, the doctors did everything they—”
“No, I get that. I get that she’s dead.” I was tempted to take the clipboard from her, just to stop it from hanging in midair, but I was afraid she’d disappear, her task finished. “I mean, how did she die?”
She finally moved—pressed the documents close to her chest, suspicious, like maybe I wasn’t who I said I was. “You are aware that your mother signed up for the Princess Diana Experience, yes? We have you listed as her emergency contact.”
How could I not be aware of it? For months it was all she talked about—never mind that I’d been promoted at work, bought a condo. The only thing that mattered was that she was flying to London, her very first trip abroad, to follow in the footsteps of the people’s princess. She’d gone into labor with me on Diana and Charles’ wedding day, which she’d woken up at 3 a.m. to watch, tea and scones and everything—how I got my name. Recently she’d been trying to lose weight because they were going to squeeze her into a replica of that enormous, frilly dress so that she could fake marry a fake prince—who would hopefully love her more than Charles had loved Di, I thought. Never said—I didn’t want to burst her bubble.
“Yeah, she told me about it,” I said. “So why am I in France? Why is my mom dead instead of touring Buckingham Palace or something?”
“It was on the itinerary.” Out came the clipboard again—only this time, she peeled off a few sheets of paper, handed them to me. “Paparazzi car chase through the Pont de l’Alma on October 6th. The real accident happened in August, of course, but the Experience is too popular to limit it to the actual dates.”
I was sixteen when my namesake died. It was Labor Day weekend, no school. Mom clung to me and cried, CNN blaring for hours. I didn’t cry. I was sixteen, and some snobby princess didn’t seem worth crying over. I’d forgotten that the crash happened in Paris.
“You fucking monsters.” The curse wobbled out of my mouth—I wasn’t expecting it. “You killed her.”
The woman seemed to have been expecting it. “I’ve also provided you with a copy of her signed waiver, absolving The Princess Diana Experience of liability.”
There it was—curlicued and childlike, cheerfully signing her life away.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “She wouldn’t leave me like this.”
Wouldn’t she? She gave me a royal name, but I was as ordinary as they come. As ordinary as she was. Never Diana enough.
“Thirty-five percent of participants survive the Experience,” the woman said. “Safer cars these days, and we can’t perfectly replicate all conditions of the accident. I’m certain she hoped for a better outcome.”
A better outcome for the princess, maybe. I could see it—Mom wanting to create a fairytale ending where Di never died, where she saw her sons happily married. And for Mom, fairytale enough that she’d never have to weep into her teenage daughter’s chest.
The woman pressed the clipboard into my hands. “Please sign here to take responsibility for the body.”
And I did sign. It was all I could do—no blossom-drenched casket mobbed by crowds, no moving tribute by Elton John. I had Mom cremated, kept her with me in my condo, until a business trip a few years later, to London, where I dumped her ashes into the Thames.
Becky Robison is a karaoke enthusiast, trivia nerd, and fiction writer from Chicago. A graduate of UNLV’s Creative Writing MFA program, her stories have appeared in , Paper Darts, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. When she’s not working her corporate job or walking her dog, she serves as Social Media and Marketing Coordinator for Split Lip Magazine.
