My apologies, I really should have written this yesterday, but it wasn't until very late I realized yesterday was…the day.

So, I guess I'm doing it today.

Eleven years ago, 31 August 1997, a bright light was tragically extinguished, taken from us by the heedless actions of representatives of the media juggernaut that stalked and preyed upon her in order to satisfy our insatiable need to know about her. It was a day indelibly etched on my consciousness, not simply because of the tremendous grief and disbelief I felt, like almost everyone else in the world, but because of a singular event I experienced, intimately connecting me to the tragedy in a way I never could have expected or anticipated.

I had no special connection to Diana; I was simply one of the many, curious masses vicariously viewing the purloined, published moments of her life as the media stole them from her and fed them to us. And yet, that day, I truly felt her pain in a way I will never forget.

This story actually starts a couple of weeks before that fateful day. I was on a bus, travelling from Winnipeg to Ontario, where I would spend two weeks visiting family and friends, and then take Shannon back to Winnipeg with me, her summer visit with her Dad being over for another year. It was the second day of the journey; I was bored, having finished my book several hundred miles ago. So, when we made a rest stop at a small roadside gasbar/diner I eagerly hopped out of the bus, hoping to procure more reading material.

A quick perusal of their scant periodical stand was bitterly disappointing. The only reading material on offer, and by my standards it barely qualified, was a whole lot of tabloids. Now, normally, I would not even have considered any of them, but the prospect of being trapped on a bus for at least another five hours with absolutely nothing to read made me break my strict policy of avoiding that trash at all costs and actually 'gulp' buy one. I went for what I figured was the least of all the evils. I don't remember which one it was now. Hey, it was eleven years ago!

Well, five minutes into it I wanted to toss it out the window. It was chock full of intrusive and extremely unflattering pictures of Diana on a beach and a yacht with Mr Feyd, and the editorial comments accompanying the pictorials, neither kind nor gracious. Yep, the magazine definitely wasn't shy about sharing its opinion of the ex-princess's latest romance, her morals and her right to be on a public beach attempting to have a normal life like any other human being while looking any less than like she'd just walked out of a salon after getting a full body-make over.

They had plenty to say, all right, and none of it was good.

It made me angry; I remember swearing at the damn thing and wishing the parasites publishing it would leave the poor woman the hell alone. I stuffed it in the trash bag and left it behind when we got to Winnipeg. After I learned she was gone, I wished I'd kept it. Just to have the contrast between how they were vilifying her two short weeks previously, and yet pursuing her relentlessly, versus deifying her after her demise. The magazine I no longer possessed became very symbolic in my mind, a foreshadowing of the building obsession and insanity culminating in that terrible chase with its tragic result.

I honestly don't know if the whole magazine episode played any part in what I experienced the day she died. I do know she was on my mind for much of that period, and I had, well, I wouldn't call it a presentiment…precisely. I only know reading that magazine and realizing what the world was saying about her bothered me, and that feeling of wrongness and impending…something, wouldn't go away.

Two weeks later it's 31 Aug, and I'm back on the bus, with Shannon, on the second day of our two day one night bus trip home. It's a beautiful late summer day, I didn't really note the time at the time, the sunlight is streaming through the windows; the bus is making its way smoothly but steadily on down the hi-way and I'm drowsing in my seat. Not quite asleep, and yet not quite awake, in that funky twilight zone between awareness and oblivion.

And…here's where it gets weird.

I was floating happily in this white, warm place when suddenly I was thrown into chaos and darkness. I felt confined, trapped, the world was spinning, literally over and over, I could feel terror like a palpable thing, and hear a woman screaming. Don't ask me how I knew, but I was certain I was in a car, and it was rolling over. The sensation of spinning, the sounds, the screaming were so utterly, frighteningly real.

I was only in this place for a couple of seconds, but the experience scared the crap out of me and I jerked abruptly awake, but briefly disoriented, completely unsure of where I actually was. When I recovered, realized I was safe in my seat on the bus and had not, in fact, just been in a crashing car, I was slightly less freaked, but still, having some sort of a whatever it was I'd just had about a car accident while in a bus, not the most reassuring thing to have happen to one. However, as I had more time to calm down and process I came to a certainty what I had tapped into had nothing to do with me. This had happened to someone else and was not, in fact, going to arrive on my doorstep.

I didn't know who that someone was, wasn't sure if I'd ever know, so I filed the incident away and went back to enjoying the ride.

Bear in mind for most of that day and into the evening I was incommunicado on a bus, so I had no way of knowing what had just happened in that tunnel in Paris until way later that evening once we hit town and taxied home. It was a little after 11, I turned on the TV and while I was unpacking my suitcase, that was when I'd heard Diana had been involved in a car crash in Paris, and she had died as a result of her injuries.

Stunned, I listened to the broadcast, learned the time of the actual accident. Did a little math, connected the dots between when the accident had happened, and allowing for the time difference, that meant about the same time the Mercedes came to the end of the line in that tunnel I was an ocean and half a continent away, was sitting on a bus…sort of drowsing…

That's when I knew whose car I'd briefly been in earlier in the day. I can't tell you how I knew, I just…

I knew.

In the days that followed, like everyone else I mourned and tried to deal with the unreality of it all, closely followed the sorrowful spectacle of the floral outpouring against the gates of Buckingham Palace, and watched every second of her funeral ceremonies. The whole time I pondered what I had experienced, how had it happened, why had it happened, and what did it mean?

In the end I came to the conclusion in all likelihood it was simply a result of being in the right place at the right time, or rather the right mental place at the right time – nothing more profound than that. That's not to say, however, it also wasn't an occasion for a powerful lesson.

I don't believe I am or was anything special enabling me to do what I did. I just got lucky. What I mean is, in that moment she was 'broadcasting', wide open, and I just happened to be an on-line receiver tuned into the right frequency.

I believe we are all connected. We are constantly broadcasting thoughts, feelings and emotions creating an interconnecting, subliminal network between all of us. The original world wide web, if you will. What we all think and feel and believe, we're continually sending it out there, each of us forming the greater, global reality we all share in the process. We also influence each other in ways we're not consciously aware of. I believe precognitive dreams, visions, hunches, come from this global web, and each one of us can tap into it. Maybe not consciously, or at will, but we do it all the time without even being aware of it. Some, obviously are better than others, and have more control over the process, but it can definitely happen, like it did to me, if the 'broadcaster' is sending out a particularly strong psychic signal, and you just happen to be, like I was, in an altered, receptive state.

I'm convinced that's what happened. I was in that null space, open and unknowingly receptive, and I got sucked in by what must have been the psychic equivalent of an atom bomb. The terror, the confusion, the pain, the disbelief, those last, desperate seconds blasting out into the ether, tearing a hole in the very fabric of reality. And I just happened to be there too, at the exact same time, wide open to making that tenuous….connection.

I can't prove any of this; of course, I know that, like most profound truths, this one is entirely internal and subjective. Nevertheless, I know what I know, and I know what I believe. And I know, just like every single one of us, everything I think, feel, believe and manifest through my thoughts and actions has a real effect not only on my personal world, but on the greater universe all the rest of us inhabit. I know the power that gives me, and as well as the accompanying responsibility to strive to be as positive an influence as possible. I can choose to make a difference. We all can.

And I have a woman I will now never meet who reached out unknowingly to me in what might have been her final, conscious seconds on Earth to thank for this amazing insight. I wish I could thank her. I wish she was still with us.

Diana, the world won't forget you. I know I never shall. Wherever you are now, I pray you have found peace.

Shape your own worlds with care and love

Phoenix