A Weight Borne and Lifted 9/11/2022

By: Jennifer Richardson Holt

The world changed this week.  I think most everyone noticed but the reactions were quite varied. An era ended.  Something I have known as a constant all my life went away. I am sure that you have guessed by now the event of which I speak. This week the Queen completed the duties to which she had devoted her entire life.  Yes, I am an American so she was not my Sovereign but if you know me you know that her loss affects me deeply. There are many reasons that this is the case and today, in honor of Her Majesty, those reasons will be my topic of choice. You don’t have to share my sentiment but I do ask you to read on in hopes that perhaps you could.

I suppose if we take it at the most basic of levels, my love for all things of the United Kingdom, its people and its Royal Family began for me as a child.  We are constantly given fairy tales as children with knights and queens and castles.  I cannot fathom anything that could possibly have appealed more to my childlike mind than the ideas of princesses and thrones. I wasn’t thinking of it in the way that some do of pretty dresses and marrying princes, though I admit those did factor in, but I envisioned more the ceremony, the tradition, the symbolism of heraldry. How many of my playtimes was I a Queen knighting some heroic subject with my jewel encrusted sword?  I was definitely a Queen that carried a sword by the way.  In my imaginary world I was willing and capable of fighting and would do so but I more often rode my massive horse, like the ones Elizabeth actually enjoyed and had as it so happens, and would be wearing a medieval gown, with sword and or dagger, in some shade of jewel-tonedvelvet.  This was my ideal setting.  I couldn’t have been more enamored with it. I knew that current royalty didn’t have jousts at feasts or courts with jesters but this is what it meant in my mind. It was a fantasy world that existed just enough in the real world that I utterly adored it.  The thing is though, this love didn’t go away.  The fondness I have for such things is just as strong today as it was back then. Perhaps I don’t still play make-believe, then again perhaps I do when nobody sees, but I still am intoxicated by it all. As an adult, I understand that being in a royal family certainly isn’t the luxuriously magical existence that it is in bedtime stories but I cannot shake how it calls to me. It isn’t a lust for power or importance because I would rather not have that. I don’t even know how to describe what it is.  There is just something undeniably magical in a crown.

My most beloved author and my ancestry fueled this fire as well. As a child my parents read to me The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and in it, children became kings and queens. They didn’t become cute little princes and princesses, they became the High Kings and High Queens of Narnia and even after coming out of the wardrobe they remained as much.  Add to that talking beasts and all sorts of mythical creatures and such tales will forever be engrained upon my heart.  Then as I have researched my ancestry to learn that there are the ruins of a castle in England that my 13^th great grandfather built and his (and therefore my) descendants lived in for generations afterwards. These distant relatives sometimes even held the position of service to the King of the time and this only strengthened my love for all things of the United Kingdom and of its royal family.  Yes, I am infinitely far removed from nobility and castle life now HOWEVER, the flames within me were only stoked when I learned that long ago, if I had been alive, my dream could have been slightly less of a dream moves me to no end.

And then, since I was a little girl, I have loved The Queen. In the immature sense, yes I suppose it was because she was a queen and most girls find at least some appeal in that. But as I have learned more about Elizabeth and her life and her reign my affection for who she was changed.  Her grandchildren called her Granny.  She loved to joke with her husband at formal events to see if there was the excitement of anything going wrong.  She served in the military during the Second World War.  She refused to stop driving her car or riding horses until she absolutely could not.  I am told by those who met with her, that she had the extraordinary ability to make you feel like you were the most important person in the world when she spoke with you.  From the time she learned as a child that she would one day be Queen her duty was the her utmost focus. She has been though all sorts of troubles some that faced the entire world all the way down to ones within her family with grace and dignity.  She had a schedule that would have challenged the youngest of us that she deftly maintained for over half a century.  No matter how you may feel about her title or her domain, you have to respect her commitment to her role. But if you dig a little deeper to the people that really knew her you begin to learn the impeccable level of character that she possessed.  From all I have garnered, she seems to have been a woman whose integrity seems fitting of the crown she bore.  I daresay that type of ruler is rather hard to come by.  And, in my humble opinion, the world is a bit less for having lost her.  You served your people well Your Majesty.  Your rest is well earned.  Your duty is beautifully done.