My mother often shared two memories of her experience as a young woman during World War II: Her grandmother, an Irish woman with memories of hunger and fear under British rule, cheering the Blitz, to her family's horror; and the impressive sight of the royal family remaining in London even as bombs dropped on Buckingham Palace. Like millions of others, my mother saw young Princess Elizabeth, who later volunteered as a military truck driver and auto mechanic, as especially heroic.
Queen Elizabeth II, who died Thursday at age 96, would live at the center of such complicated and often oppositional mythology for decades to come.
As has been said many times over, we look to the royal family for the kind of jewel-encrusted, gilded coach-chauffeured institutional ritual that this country, by choice and definition, does not have.
