Tears Are Shed Worldwide In Farewell To Princess Television Viewers Don’t Just Watch Mourning, But Share In It Personally

Waking up early, staying up late, or stopping in their day, people around the world tuned in Saturday to join the mourning for a woman whose passing seemed strangely personal to millions.

Estimates for the worldwide audience for Princess Diana’s funeral ranged as high as 2.5 billion. BBC Television transmitted it worldwide. BBC Radio broadcast it in 44 languages.

In Singapore, in Moscow, in Houston, viewers spoke not of watching the mourning for a British princess, but of sharing it.

“I see this as a very family funeral,” said Donata Gilardi, a 60-year-old nurse who watched the funeral live in Venice. “It touches the bottom of my heart. I feel like I’m participating - it’s not just a matter of curiosity.”

“This is a funeral that has mobilized an entire people, even the people of the whole world,” said Louise Berlioz, who watched it in Lyon, France.

In Paris, the boss of one of 10 paparazzi under investigation in Diana’s fatal car crash insisted he felt the loss of Diana as much as anyone - even as much as Diana’s brother, who attacked the prying press in his eulogy Saturday.

“He can’t say he loved Lady Di more than I loved Lady Di,” Goksin Sipahioglu, the president of Sipa Press, protested. “I cried too.”

While hushed throngs in London strained to see the coffin pass to and from Westminister Abbey, mourners placed bouquets on the site of the crash in Paris, at a monument to land-mine victims in Geneva, and at British embassies around the world. At New York City’s Rockefeller Plaza, a Union Jack at half-staff waved forlornly in the gray morning light.

Tears streamed down Alex Mahlke’s face while he stood watching the funeral in the darkened Britannia Pub in Santa Monica, Calif.

“It’s not so much that she was a princess, but a real person. The circumstances of her death are so tragic and unnecessary,” Mahlke said.

In Russia, President Boris Yeltsin took time at a celebration of Moscow’s 850th anniversary to say: “We remember that in Britain there is a tragedy.”

At Stockholm’s tennis stadium, players crowded around a television in the lobby. “Shh, it’s Diana’s funeral,” one mother gently scolded her rambunctious son, tennis racket in hand.

“It was classy, like she was,” said Michelle Lara, a shopper at Houston’s Galleria mall, who woke up hours early to watch the service.

Across Asia, people devoted hours to watching the rites live on television.

In the Bangladeshi town of Comilla, Liaqat Ali Dulal changed the name of his cafe from Comilla Restaurant to Diana Restaurant, then served up free food to 5,000 destitute people.

Even in India, still reeling from Mother Teresa’s death Friday, state-run television and radio were broadcasting the funeral live. Indian newspapers carried front-page stories comparing the selfless service of Mother Teresa and Diana.

In the bar at the American Club in Singapore, patrons watched the funeral on six television sets. When Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey asked those around the world to recite the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, many in the bar prayed the words aloud.

In Paris, the staff of the swank Ritz Hotel, where Diana spent her last hours, observed a minute of silence at noon.

Throughout the day in Geneva, people placed flowers at the monument to land-mine victims - marking Diana’s campaign to ban land mines, one of several causes to which she lent her celebrity.

“In memory of Diana, Princess of Wales, who worked so hard to heal the world, to make it a better place for you and for me and for the entire human race,” the tag on one bouquet declared.

After the shock of the princess’s death and a week of unrelenting mourning, Saturday’s pageantry seemed to bring the catharsis that many were waiting for.

“Coming here, watching this funeral, is like setting everything to rest,” said Ted Spate, a London-born New Yorker watching the funeral at a Greenwich Village pub.