The Queen Is Dead
In 1953 southern Indiana, public schools ran into June, but on June 2nd everybody left school and regrouped in the homes of classmates who had TVs. I was in the fifth grade and we had a brand-new TV. My mother served lemonade in Dixie cups to twenty or so kids packed into our living room beneath framed Audubon prints and her collection of Wedgwood miniatures. Nobody spilled a drop. We were there to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II as Queen of England in black and white on a flickering, bulbous, ten-inch screen. Best behavior was understood as essential in her presence. It didn’t have to be said. We all knew. We still do.
Elizabeth, whoever she may have been in the guarded privacy of her personal life, in public unerringly set the standard for what is publicly appropriate, acceptable. Those of us who remain from that time know the rules, which place the maintenance of dignity above all else. On her fell responsibility for the dignity of a tradition extending for ten centuries into history, the British monarchy. On us, as the English-speaking renegade heirs to that tradition, fell a nearly subconscious identity with it. She was our queen, too, a relic of our language, our nursery rhymes and games, our formal education. Although we no longer do so, we know how to behave.
But with her death On Thursday at 96, that time is officially over. It’s unofficially been over for years, propriety engulfed in celebrity culture and tabloid sleaze, an ignorant, arrogant, dirty joke in the White House trying to destroy the government and make himself king while the only planet that can sustain our definition of “life” burns, ignored, beneath our feet. We’ve lost the backbone, the sense of obligation to duty that animated Elizabeth, only 48 hours from her death, to meet, formally appoint and talk with a new U.K. Prime Minister, Liz Truss. There is no hint of weakness, of impending death, in photos of that meeting. Elizabeth in plaid skirt and cardigan holds a cane and her hallmark handbag, eyes sparkling with impish intelligence as she greets the fifteenth prime minister to serve during her reign. There is a sense that she is amused at the number. We will not see those eyes again.
The British monarchy is at once a primitive, elaborate charade borne on the shoulders of often frail and fallible people, and an inspiring, if impossible, model for the best that may be hoped for in human conduct. With Elizabeth the monarchy may now perish under the crushing weight of a new reality in which there are no rules. That’s likely, although not immediately.
What will happen immediately is nine days of flowers stacked at the gates of Buckingham Palace and proper, black-edged letters of condolence from heads of state, followed on the tenth day by a queen’s funeral. If her funeral is televised I’ll watch it, drinking lemonade from a Dixie cup if I can find one.
Farewell, Elizabeth. You were magnificent.
I'll say it again: it is like the last moments of our lives as we knew them are slipping away from us. In my case with age and additional frailty, but I want to cling to the memories of those comfortable times when we knew the rules and followed them. My first boss was Mr. not Roger. We were not on a first-name basis with our parents' friends who were referred to as aunts and uncles as was proper. I mourn the end of this era and the passing of the monarch I suspected had a sly sense of humor in her private world. I'll mss her hats and handbags. I'd take a corgi if offered.
Thank you Abbie. Beautifully stated. I was a six-year old girl in Iowa when Elizabeth took the throne. I was enraptured. She was "my Queen." As I entered my teen years, she resembled one of my grandmothers so much I decided to adopt her as my royal grandmother. I mourn her loss in a personal way, as if she was indeed my family. Prince-now-King Charles...I reserve judgment.