Oh, great. Another Princess Diana story. Three months ago, words like those would have made me look up from my Diana article long enough to shoot darts at you with my eyes. Thwping! That would be one for desecrating the sacred memory of a Princess with a capital "P." Thwping! A second for impertinently implying that the media coverage of Diana's death was becoming (God forbid) tedious. Thwping! Another for the comment's overt sarcasm. Diana would have just loved that.

Funny thing is, though, I never really cared that much for Diana at all until she died. I can still remember the day I heard the news. It was a perfect, clear Sunday before Labor Day, ideal for reveling in our laborlessness before it all came down in one fell swoop. By the time I set out for lunch at noon, I was in high spirits: The sun was shining, birds were twittering and Mexican lasagna was Valentine's entree du jour. Well, at least I had two out of three. I strode over to the table, tray in hands and tennis in mind, and had barely made eye contact with my tablemates when one of them bombarded me with the news.

"Hi. Did you hear? Princess Di died."

The words made my tray feel about a thousand times heavier. I set it down with a thud."What?"

"Princess Di died. We heard it this morning. She got into an accident and BOOM! Now she's dead."

Dead? Princess Diana? Yeah, right. Like it is that easy to knock off a princess.

"You're joking," I said."It's just a joke. Ha ha. Not funny."

"No, it's not a joke!" he implored."It's the truth. I heard it from a whole bunch of people this morning. It's true."

Murmurs of agreement went up from the table.

I eyed all of them suspiciously."You're sure about this? You swear that it's true? Do you pinky swear?"

He linked my pinky without a moment's hesitation. Right then I knew that it was true -Princess Diana had died.

As it did most of her mourners, Princess Diana's death sent shockwaves through my heart along faultlines that I never even knew existed. Sure, I had heard of her before her death -anyone who has been living above ground for the past 17 years knows Princess Diana. She is the one who married Prince Charles in a regal eat-your-heart-out-Cinderella wedding (which we probably watched on TV from the comfort of our potty-training toilets); the one who, with each passing year, revealed a new skeleton in the closet; the one who seemed to be a good person with a bad husband; and the one who got the royal flush from the British Royal Family (obligatory haughty sniff here). But seeing as I was neither British nor royal, I never really needed to know much more. Out of the five billion people that are estimated to inhabit the earth, Princess Diana was about 4.9 billion degrees of separation from me, and as far as I was concerned, neither she nor I was missing much.

But for a woman I never gave two clucks about before, Diana suddenly meant a lot more to me in death than she ever did in life. I saw myself as the guardian of Diana's memory, the perpetuator of Diana's legacy, the keeper of Diana's eternal flame. I would accomplish this, of course, by reading Diana's posthumous magazine articles -all 84 madzillion of them.

The question a mano here is why? Why this big hullaballoo over the death of a princess? More importantly, why the hootenanny over Princess Diana? Was she extraordinary enough to warrant media coverage galore -a good three months after her death? Was she divine enough to bump Mother Teresa off about eight pages in Newsweek in the issue that appeared during the week of Mother Teresa's death -the week after Princess Diana's? In truly epistemological terms, what is up with all this Dianarama?

By now, all of us know of the turbulence in the 16-year marriage of Diana and Prince Charles. And all of us witnessed the royal mud-slinging between Diana and the royal family, the 20-year relationship between Camilla Parker-Bowles and Prince Charles -of which Diana had been aware even before her wedding, and the self-destructive measures a love starved Diana took to get some attention. But who would have thought that just months after her fairy-tale wedding to Prince Charles, a distraught Diana would slowly destroy her body with regular bouts of bulimia? And who would have thought that, in the midst of her bulimia, a three-month pregnant Diana would throw herself down the stairs after a particularly acrimonious fight with Charles? Certainly not Diana. She was only 21.

Granted, it is a sob story, but it was not like Diana did not have her share of flaws: She was reportedly an incredibly moody employer, and her cavorts with Egyptian playboys certainly did not sit well with the people whose princess she tried to be. But put yourself in Diana's place for a minute, and suddenly you will know why only little girls dream of being princesses -and why nobody dreamed of being Princess Diana. Princess Diana's life was not a dream come true -it was a nightmare. And the whole world got to watch.

What Dianamania is all about is the story of a woman who was too perfect to be human, too human to be perfect, and too young to have died so soon. It is about a woman who was twice-wronged: robbed first of a life of privilege by the royal family, and then robbed of life itself by an intoxicated French security guard outrunning paparazzi during what should have been a five-minute car ride. But only in death can Diana cement her role as a symbol of modernity in an otherwise antiquated monarchy, her role as a cultural emblem of humanitarianism and peace in a world ravaged by pestilence and inequality. And only through extensive media coverage of her death can we find out more about her extraordinary life. She is the JFK of the 90s: Where were you when Princess Diana died?

Diana's charisma stems from the fact that she did what no other celebrity, much less British royalty, would ever do: She reached out to the"outcasts" of society and showed how little separates fortune from misfortune. No matter that she had, through the years, transformed into a sleek, stylish icon, a paragon of grace and beauty rivaled by no other. She was still out there, crusading to eliminate land mines, comforting land mine victims in Angola, shaking the hands of AIDS patients before it was posh to do so.

There is a picture in the commemorative issue of Newsweek that captures Diana's generosity better than my words ever could: In it, Princess Diana hugs an 11-year-old Chicago girl upon the girl's release from a hospital. But Diana does not just hug her; she clutches her with both arms, her brows furrowed in concern and compassion. She presses her face against the girl's, squishing the girl's nose and mouth against her cheek. If the picture were at a better angle, we could probably see the tears that her gesture implies. It makes my heart hurt, because there are no lines between royalty and commonfolk here, no evidence of the Most Watched Woman in the World paying her respects to an invalid -just a mother hugging a child who is not even her own. You would never guess that the mother was Princess Diana. That, to me, is the best part.

On my way home for Thanksgiving break, a friend lent me a Cosmopolitan to pass time on the plane. On the cover of the issue, dated November 1997, three months after Diana's death in Paris, was a blurb about"Princess Diana: Fond Memories From Those Who Knew Her Best," wedged right between"The Seven Little Signs He Loves You When He's Too Chicken to Say It" and"Big Butt Be Gone." The day after my arrival, my family and I toured an open house during our current attempt to move to a suburb nearer to my dad's place of work. On the coffee table sat Diana: A Tribute in Photographs. These days, Diana seems to be making more pop-up appearances than Elvis. And, though I never thought I would say this, it is growing rather tiresome.

So now, as I sit in front of my TV, writing the 84 madzillionth-plus-one article about Diana while watching Fox News"Follow in the Footsteps of Diana" with its segment,"Angola: Diana's Mission of Mercy," I cannot help but hope that these Diana Days will soon be over. Her death caught her 36 years of life in freeze frame, and we discovered that the only thing standing between mortality and immortality for Diana was a concrete column in the tunnel beneath the Place de l'Alma. We will always remember Diana as the beautiful Queen That Could Have Been, a woman whose"new life" ended as spontaneously as it began. Like the illustrious Princess Grace of Monaco and James Dean, Diana's violent death will leave her forever young. And it is for this reason that I would hope the media would have enough decency to put an end to Dianarama. You have captured Diana in words and pictures, and we thank you for that. Now, with all due respect to the Princess of Wales, please, media mongrels, let her die.

But, if you ever spot Diana and Elvis hanging out together at K-Mart, let me know.

Jenny Kim is a member of the Amherst College Class of 2000