The princess and the nun

Diana, Mother Teresa linked in life and in death

In this story:

• Numbing reality
• Needy vulnerability
• A life in progress
• Power, fame, wealth
• Unerring sense of purpose

From CNN Interactive Writer John Christensen

(CNN) -- On the afternoon of June 18, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales met in New York City with Mother Teresa, the Calcutta nun known as "the saint of the gutters" and winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

They met not in a grand suite of an exclusive hotel, as people of their celebrity might, nor at the United Nations, as would have befit their international stature.

They met, instead, in a grim brick building on East 145th Street in a poverty-stricken area of the Bronx known as Mott Haven. The building, surrounded by a chain-link fence and topped with concertina wire, houses Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity.

The princess and the nun had met before, brought together by a common concern for the less fortunate. "She was very much concerned about the poor," Mother Teresa said months later. "That's why she came close to me."

They emerged from the mission that day holding hands, Diana smartly turned out in an off-white suit, the tiny, wizened nun looking frail in her white, $1 sari with the blue trim.

They shook hands on the sidewalk while cameras rolled and nuns, bystanders and police officers watched. Mother Teresa composed herself on the sidewalk, hands pressed together in the pose of prayerful respect common in the East, and spoke some final words to the princess.

When Mother Teresa finished, Diana bent down to hug her, then walked to her limousine. She paused to wave at bystanders and flash her famous smile before riding away.

Two months later, fate brought them together again.

On Sunday, August 31, Princess Diana died from injuries she suffered in an automobile accident in Paris. Five days later, Mother Teresa died of heart failure in Calcutta, India.

Seldom, if ever, have the deaths of two such well-known and well-loved people occurred so close together, or with such cathartic effect in the global village.

Both were given state funerals that drew enormous, adoring crowds. Diana's funeral in London, an event televised worldwide, seemed eerily like a global day of mourning.

Mother Teresa's funeral was also televised internationally, and in Calcutta, many in a crowd estimated at 1 million pressed close to the procession, hoping to touch her casket as it passed.

Mother Teresa was 87 when she died and had lived a long and exceptionally productive life. Diana, however, was 36. Her death was not only premature, but tragic and violent as well. She left behind two young sons and a profound sense of loss that was stunning in its reach.

She was, as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, "the people's princess," and in a sense had been public property since she was 19 and was wooed and later wed by Prince Charles.

Their fairy-tale wedding gave way to the numbing reality of life in the fabulously dysfunctional royal family. Indeed, it became Britain's most riveting soap opera, one in which the prince proved to be enamored of another woman and apparently required Diana only as a broodmare to provide him with heirs.

Diana's own adulterous fling, the royal divorce and later episodes in which she acquired the name "Squidgie" from one lover and flirted with bulimia became the very lifeblood of the tabloids.

In truth, Diana never quite outgrew the symbolism of her title. Well into her 30s, she seemed less the accomplished woman than a naive young woman whose dazzling smile couldn't conceal the sadness and needy vulnerability in her eyes.

Even in the sleek gowns she wore to spectacular effect, the princess seemed diffident and uncertain, and grateful for the arm of a man to guide her.

Her romance with billionaire playboy Dodi Fayed struck some as another misadventure in the making, and the tabloids gleefully pounced on every peccadillo. Most notable was a photo of Diana lounging on a yacht with Fayed. The strap of her bathing suit straying down her arm, Diana looked more a B movie starlet than the mother of the future king of England.

Her problem was perhaps less the behavior than its timing. Swept out of school and into marriage, Diana never got to be a normal young adult, a time for trying on and taking off personas as if they were clothes at The Gap.

Denied that process of personal discovery, she became a martyr to love, confusing the approval of others with the empowering sense of self she lacked.

On the last night of her life, footage from a security camera in the hotel where Diana and Fayed dined caught them waiting for the car that would take them to their deaths. Even viewed from the back, one got the impression of watching not poised and mature adults, but teenagers waiting for their ride home from a dance.

Had she lived, Diana might never have found her center. Many never do. But millions were rooting for her, and it may be that her death caused such sadness because her life was so visibly in progress.

The irony in her association with Mother Teresa is that it wasn't until the nun was 36 -- Diana's age at death -- that she discovered her true calling.

Teresa joined a Catholic teaching order at 18, but it was while aboard a train to the Himalayan region of Darjeeling that she said God told her to devote herself to "the poorest of the poor."

She opened her first mission with 12 people in one of Calcutta's desperate neighborhoods, and during the next 50 years, Mother Teresa worked with the poor, the sick, the maimed, the endangered, the homeless and the helpless.

Her single-mindedness was such that when Pope Paul VI gave her a white Lincoln Continental, she auctioned it off and used the money to establish a leper colony. On another occasion, she persuaded Lebanese guerrillas and Israeli troops to stop shooting at each other so she could evacuate 37 children trapped in a Beirut hospital.

As a bride of Christ, Mother Teresa disavowed power, fame and wealth, and yet she became powerful and famous and generated enough wealth to support a worldwide organization with 4,000 employees.

But she was not without her critics. A 1994 British TV documentary criticized her for accepting donations without questioning the sources, and for her strict views on abortion and divorce. Mother Teresa shrugged it off.

"No matter who says what," she said, "you should accept it with a smile and do your own work."

That went for praise, too. Informed that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa said, "I am unworthy."

Mother Teresa was her own woman -- she probably would have said she was God's daughter -- guided by an unerring sense of purpose that drove her to franchise compassion in more than 100 countries.

A year after the deaths of the princess and the nun, Diana is remembered for her gentle, wounded goodness, and for seeming to prove, as many suspect, that life is unfair. Yet she had the opportunity to learn that it isn't necessarily so.

For in Mother Teresa, Princess Diana met a woman come to the world's stage not through birth, marriage or connection, but through the fruits of her own determined efforts. Mother Teresa did not seek admiration or approval, but rather the fulfillment of her calling. In the process, she found herself.