Grieving Princess Diana Let Me Mourn My Brother
  August 30, 2022 Hola Meteor readers, I am a puddle of emotions this week. Last night Serena Williams walked onto the court for her first match at her last-ever U.S Open, a tournament she’s won six times over the years. The game was followed by a beautiful tribute from Billie Jean King and a special video narrated by Oprah thanking Serena for everything she’s done for the sport of tennis. And as if that wasn’t enough: Taylor Swift announced a new album for October, so I really don’t know how I’m going to manage all these feelings through the fall. Today’s newsletter is also somber and reflective. In honor of the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death tomorrow, writer Susanne Ramirez de Arellano explores how the princess’s death helped her mourn a more personal one—and what she’s learned in the years since. But first: some news. Lighting a candle, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ON“Monsoon on steroids.” That’s just one phrase that’s been used to describe the onslaught of devastating floods that have put a third of Pakistan underwater. The word “dire” fails to capture how bad things are, with a death toll of over 1,000, nearly half a million citizens displaced, and entire cities, towns, and agricultural sites completely wiped out. It’s nothing short of a climate catastrophe, made worse by the country’s melting glaciers. To help those in need, please consider donating through UNICEF, the IRC, Islamic Relief, or LaunchGood.  Then there’s this: In a video shared by Jessica Valenti on Instagram, a story of forced birth that is too horrific told by a pediatric gynecologist in South Carolina.  AND:
 WE REMEMBERIt would be the last time I saw my brother alive. BY SUSANNE RAMÍREZ DE ARELLANO  PRINCESS DIANA IN PARIS, 1988. (IMAGE BY BY JAYNE FINCHER VIA GETTY IMAGES) Tomorrow will be 25 years since Princess Diana died in a car crash in Paris, chased by paparazzi on motorcycles in the Pont de L’Alma. Her tragic end shocked the world and caused an unprecedented outpouring of grief in Britain. Her death also embedded itself as a timepost in my life: It would be the last time I saw my younger brother alive. The sequence of that day plays out in my mind’s eye like an old film. I had traveled from London (where I was living and working for a news agency) to New York to see my brother. He was very sick, but he would be flying from Hawaii to see us. My sister called and bluntly said, “I think you’d better get on a plane.” In a blur, I packed, rushed to the airport, and arrived late at night. My beautiful brother, John Lawrence, known to us as Larry, had full-blown AIDS. I woke up the following day to the front page of The New York Times: Diana, Princess of Wales, 36, Dies in a Crash in Paris. I sat at my sister’s kitchen table, in her beautiful home, with a sense of impending doom, only able to read the first paragraph again and again. I refused to believe it. First, my brother, a shadow of his former self, was dying. And now Diana. Two people whose stories would become surreally intertwined in my life. Diana was a facet of daily life in London. Her face was everywhere: in newspapers and magazines, on television programs, and on tea towels. I had seen the fairytale wedding, witnessed the unraveling of her marriage, and been inspired by the emergence of a strong-willed woman coming into her own. And, of course, we all remember that “revenge dress” at the Serpentine Gallery. My brother and I watched the funeral together. (In truth, I think I forced him to watch it.) He lay on the sofa next to me as I stroked his thin legs, and we spoke of the woman who championed the cause of people living with AIDS. Diana publicly took on the HIV crisis as a cause in 1987 when she opened the U.K.’s first HIV/AIDS unit at London’s Middlesex Hospital. She changed the way people thought about AIDS with just one gesture by shaking hands (without wearing gloves) with an AIDS patient who was terminally ill. It was the 1980s, and the shame around the illness was virulent. For me, her gesture was a visually powerful way to confront HIV/AIDS stigma, a public challenge to the notion that HIV was passed from person to person by touch. It was the opposite of my family’s reaction. My father refused to acknowledge that Larry had AIDS, avoiding the crushing inevitability of what would happen. After my brother passed away, he would say that Larry had died of a tumor.  PRINCESS DIANA EXCHANGING HOLIDAY GIFTS WITH A PATIENT IN AN AIDS HOSPICE IN CANADA. (IMAGE BY TIM GRAHAM VIA GETTY IMAGES) The princess was just 36 when she died; my brother, who passed away two months later, on October 30, 1997, was 37. Today, Diana would be 61 and my brother 62—two lives cut short when both had so much in front of them. At present, there are approximately 38.4 million people across the globe living long and healthy lives with HIV. In 2021, 28.7 million people with HIV had access to antiretroviral therapy globally. Yet I am still angry that more was not done to fight AIDS earlier. It could have saved my brother. Maybe it would have given him time to teach me how to surf. Instead, I can still see him riding the waves, lithe and athletic, like a dancer. Larry would laugh because I never stayed on the board for more than a minute. (But how exhilarating that minute was!) This interlacing of stories—Diana’s death and my brother’s—is not a weepy fascination; there are no happy endings here. But Diana’s funeral, and the collective grief of the British, allowed me to deal with what was happening in my life. The mourning of her loss permitted me to grieve mine.  Susanne Ramírez de Arellano is an author on race and diversity, opinion writer, and cultural critic. The former news director of Univision, she writes for NBC News Think, Latino Rebels, and Nuestros Stories, among other outlets. She lives in Brooklyn and is busy writing her first novel.  FOLLOW THE METEOR    Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.
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