Princess Diana Once Stopped Outside a Cemetry to Comfort a Grieving Mother, Her Close Pal Revealed

Princess Diana wasn't loved for no reason. As she once put it, she would like to be the queen of people's hearts and she indeed was. The 'People's Princess,' who set many examples of what a kind and compassionate human should be like, once stopped outside a cemetery where she saw a mother crying on her dead son's grave and comforted her. 

Barely a few weeks before she tragically died in August 1997, the late princess traveled to Bosnia as part of her anti-landmine advocacy work. Her friends Ken Rutherford and Jerry White accompanied her on the trip and relayed the touching story ahead of the premiere of the 2017 documentary- Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy to mark 20 years of her death. 

Her close pal, White, told Entertainment Weekly on their last day of the three-day trip to Bosnia that Diana insisted they stop at the Sarajevo War Cemetry to pay tribute to the victims of the Bosnian War buried there. "The image of her in a cemetery in Sarajevo, on the last day of our trip still haunts me. It wasn't planned. It was never on the itinerary," recalled White.

"But Diana told me three times, 'I can't get this picture of me in a cemetery out of my mind.' She asked me if there was a cemetery nearby, as it was something we should visit," continued the friend, recounting Diana's words, "'Jerry, I have this feeling, this image of me in a cemetery, it's strange.' We were running late for a final reception, and there was no room for this detour, but Princess Diana seemed adamant, mysteriously." 

The friend then narrated the eerie moment when Diana "took her place among hundreds of tombstones. She met a Bosnian mother tending to the grave of her son, grieving visibly. Diana didn't speak Bosnian, and this mother didn't know English. So, they just embraced. So intimately, so physical, so emotional, mother-to-mother. It was vintage Diana, reaching out, wiping the mother's tears and cheeks. It's the only framed photograph of Diana I still have in my home." 

Weeks later, on August 31, 1997, Diana lost her life in a car crash alongside her then-boyfriend and Egyptian businessman Dodi Al-Fayed, her bodyguard, and her driver Henri Paul. After her death, White noted, "I don't know, but maybe, psychically, intuitively, Diana sensed she was going to die. It still gives me chills when I recall this powerful, unscripted, unplanned moment, somehow prescient." 

In her lifetime, she championed many humanitarian causes like HIV Aids, landmine work, homelessness, and disabled issues to name a few. The same year she died, she was spotted doing a landmine walk in Angola on 15 January 1997. She visited there as a guest of the International Red Cross. 

At the time, she told the press, "There couldn't be a more appropriate place to begin this campaign than Angola because this nation has the highest number of amputees per population than anywhere in the world," as per BBC.