I’m putting this in GD because I’m not positive of what I’m about to say, just inclined to think this way, and I’m curious to know what others think. But it’s a bit touchy for MPSIMS or IMHO, so here I am.
I never felt, at the time, that Mother Teresa’s death was being overshadowed by Princess Diana’s. It didn’t go unremarked. There was some disparity in the media coverage and public reaction, but hadn’t there always been? So Diana got a metric ton of flowers left at the palace gates. Well, that’s where she had lived, and it was relatively easy to get to. Where would people have left flowers for MT? Diana got more column inches than MT. Well, yeah, but more had been written about Diana when she was alive. And a lot of the space was taken up by photos.
ISTM that the mourning for both was the same as it would have been otherwise. It’s only because they coincided that people make this one-to-one comparison. Now, you can criticize the media for devoting too much attention to the royals and not enough to humanitarian efforts right along, but by 1997, it was way too late to change that.
Also, the mother of a friend of mine died the same week as the two notables, and her funeral was hugely attended by community standards. They had to open a second guest book for the viewing. Her husband asked for donations in lieu of flowers, and the total was enormous. She’d been a nurse, you see, and had touched many lives besides being a fine person. No one prioritized Diana or MT above her.
Unless you count loose talk while they were drinking their coffee, but it’s not like they stayed home to watch a funeral on TV instead of attend one. So I’m not entirely buying the “People cared too much about a person they didn’t know” argument. They cared a lot about a person they did know, so who cares if they cared a little about someone they didn’t?
Had Diana and Teresa not died so close together then I think Teresa’s death would have made for bigger news. Yes, Diana’s death eclipsed Teresa’s death. I felt it at the time, I feel it’s true now, but I don’t really think it makes a difference one way or the other. I didn’t particularly care when either one of them bought the farm.
Marc
Still, enough people were fanatical about Mother Teresa to put her immediately on the fast track to sainthood based on lies and posthumous propaganda. Plus she was mediocre in most facets of her personality (except her extreme faith), while Diana was beautiful, charismatic, and winning, loved by her people.
It was a public outpouring of emotion that I don’t think we’ve seen the like of before or since.
I believe I’m right in saying that a lot of people sheepishly look back at their own emotions at the time and find them somewhat inexplicable - it’s as if the whole miasma of grief took on a life of its own and snowballed into something bigger than the sum of its parts, and demanding and extracting more emotional input from its contributors than they would naturally expect to have given.
That being the case, I think there is an argument for it having overshadowed other news events of the time, simply because it was huge. It was *unnaturally *huge.
Even without that, it was a massive media focus. Without it, any other stories in the media would have been more extensively covered, so even without the factor of it being abnormal, it’s undeniable that it overshadowed other stories, because that’s what big headlines always do anyway.
Popular opinion as well as my own: Diana’s death was a tragic unnecessary end to a troubled life that still had so much promise. Mother Teresa’s death was an elderly woman who did a lot of good finally going on to her Lord & her eternal reward.
So there would naturally be a lot more grief over Diana’s death.
Not in Ireland anyway. We’re a bit catholic heavy here though and the little Albanian nun has been here not too long before. Our national TV and Radio covered the funeral and surrounding events live on TV uninterupted for the whole day.
Internationally though, yes to Di taking the headlines, that was what I was hearing at the time.
Well, I’d go with kinda cute, pleasant enough (though a bit of a moron), and more winning than her ex (as if that were a challenge), but the last one was all but inexplicable to me. I thought the hoopla was ridiculous, like a country going nuts over the death of Paris Hilton, but in keeping with our popstar culture. Mother T was also a bit of a popstar, but she was also a crabby old lady who had been out of the limelight for a couple years and plenty of people were a bit surprised she wasn’t already dead. Add in that she appealed mostly to Catholics and had made a career out of making Westerners feel guilty and you have the makings of a subdued reaction whatever the other headlines were.
ok i have to confess, i personally wasnt old enough to know of diana at the time of her death and everything i know about her is secondhand knowledge. the point still stands, and everything else has also been pointed out now–MT was old and saw it coming, diana was young and running from paparazzi, MT was grumpy and frankly quite mean, diana was a celebrity, etc.
edited to add:
diana did humanitarian work (however little) that didnt center around the idea that pain and suffering was good for sick people in the eyes of god.
Did John F Kennedy steal Adolis Huxley & C.S. Lewis’s thunder?
Did Jim Henson steal Sammy Davis Jr’s thunder?
Did John Ritter steal Johnny Cash’s thunder?
The unexpected and young person’s death overshadows the older, more predicitable person’s death.
Possibly because Diana didn’t live off the festering wounds and suffering of others, in order to justify her own self-righteous existence. Sure, Diana was concerned with people who were suffering, but she didn’t ***need ***to be surrounded by suffering, the way Theresa did. Think about the fact that Theresa never got around to actually alleviating any of that suffering, only to glorify it. Yet when she herself needed medical attention, she whisked herself away to one of the best (and most expensive) medical centers on the planet.
And Diana wasn’t the one who said that AIDS might have been God’s punishment for gay people.
Yeah, Mother Theresa deserved about as much mourning as a shady uncle who stole money from everyone he knew. Diana was a person who actually tried to use her celebrity, mostly undeserved though it was, to do good. It’s a shame Mother Theresa got the coverage she did. Her only deserved coerage would be an expose on Frontline.