Obituary: Queen Elizabeth II

 It wasn't a surprise given her age, but then again it still shocked the world that 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II passed away earlier today.  Tributes are coming from around the world for someone who was as loved and admired as the Queen was.

The Queen started her reign in 1952, upon the death of her father.  This year was the Jubilee Year noting her seven decades of service for the UK and the Commonwealth.  For the majority of the world's population, including yours truly, they never experienced a time there was another British monarch, until today.

She loved her horses, still riding them well into her nineties.  She also was a devotee of Welsh corgis.

The Queen was active until almost the end.  When she was getting increasingly older, she cut back on her appearances, and, with the COVID pandemic, scaled back further.  She also suffered a great personal loss last year when her husband of some 73 years, Prince Philip,  died  at the age of 99.  She considered him her rock, the one person she counted on for feedback and advice.  Then she suffered another blow when she was diagnosed with COVID in February.  People noticed she had lost a great deal of weight and seemed to be much more frail in her last months.

The Royal Family had more than its share of sorrows, tragedies, and scandals, but through it all Queen Elizabeth remained stoic, always putting duty above everything.  She was a symbol of stability.

With her death, her long-waiting son Prince Charles is now King, with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, his Queen Consort.  Defying tradition, he decided to keep his name.  He will be called Charles III.  The previous two Charleses left a lot to be desired, but this Charles doesn't care.  He is going to carve his own path.

It will be interesting how much Camilla will be accepted.  I have long been a big fan of hers, but there are still many diehards of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who have never forgiven Camilla for the breakup of the so-called fairytale marriage.  Camilla, though, is just great, with a wonderful sense of humor.  She is not a bit fake.  It is not hard to see what Charles saw in her.  She was his perfect match.

There will be ten days of mourning for the Queen until she is finally laid to rest.

From the NYT obit:

 

Earlier Thursday, Buckingham Palace said that the queen had been placed under medical supervision and that her doctors were “concerned” about her health. She had remained at Balmoral for much of the summer. On Wednesday evening, she abruptly canceled a virtual meeting with members of her Privy Council after her doctors advised her to rest.

On Tuesday, she met with the incoming Conservative prime minister, Liz Truss — the 15th prime minister the queen dealt with during her reign — though in doing so, because of infirmity, she broke with longstanding tradition by receiving her at Balmoral rather than at Buckingham Palace.

Elizabeth’s long years as sovereign were a time of enormous upheaval, in which she sought to project and protect the royal family as a rare bastion of permanence in a world of shifting values.

At her coronation on June 2, 1953, a year after she acceded to the throne, she surveyed a realm emerging from an empire of such geographical reach that it was said the sun never set on it. But by the new century, as she navigated her advancing years with increasing frailty, the frontiers had shrunk back. As Britain prepared to leave the European Union in 2020, a clamor for independence in Scotland was rekindled, potentially threatening to narrow her horizons yet further.

Her coronation was the first royal event of its kind to be broadcast almost in full on television. But it was a token of the changes — and global fascination — that accompanied her time as queen that her reign became the subject of a Hollywood movie and a blockbuster series on Netflix, while her family’s travails offered voluminous grist to the busy mill of social media.

I think we can be assured we will never see another one like her.