Ten years ago

Ten years ago (yesterday) was indeed one of those fabled moments when you do remember exactly where you were and what you were doing.  Finally my generation had the equivalent of JFK’s assassiniation, even though the former was of far greater significance than the latter.

I was up in Palmerston North with my friend Anna from Germany.  We were in the Square and at a bookshop when we heard someone say Diana had been injured in a car crash.  We rushed back to our car and turned on the news.  It started with reciting that Diana was badly injured but by the end of the bulletin, she was dead.

Looking back, in hindsight, it seems illogical that one was so stunned.  She was after all just a pretty woman who had married a Prince.  But that belies that she had become a cultural icon, beyond national boundaries. Anna and I went over to Massey University and had a walk through their lawns and grounds before then catching the next hourly news bulletin, and then heading back to Wellington.

A week or so later I watched the funeral with some friends.  The women of course blubbered through out 🙂 but even I have to admit I lost it when Elton John sang that song.

Other events have been of far more significance.  I can’t recall what I was doing with Reagan was shot or Pope John Paul II. Maybe it is because they survived.  Also the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the most amazing event in my lifetime, doesn’t resonate in terms of a specific memory.  Maybe this time because it happened as part of a chain of events over some weeks.  Perhaps you need the total surprise for it sear into your memory.

Diana’s death is not the most seared though.  That is reserved for around 2 am on the 12th of September 2001, or the 11th of September in New York City.   I can almost recall frame by frame the events of that day, the reaction at work where we sat fixated on CNN day in and day out, and those terrible terrible shots of people jumping off a 100 story building.  While not as significant an event as the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it is the event which is the most raw.

I’ve really only got three “seared” memories – as in those where you recall an unusual amount of detail.  Diana’s death, 9/11 and being told in the fifth form (Year 11) that two of our classmates had died in a car crash.