I was watching a documentary about Princess Diana when I looked at the date and realized that it had been exactly twenty-six years since her funeral.

Princess Diana really defines the 90s for me in many ways. Her last, most exciting years and her death occurred right in the middle of my family’s People magazine era. These days I don’t recognize any of the faces on the front of People, but there was a time when we all read People magazine cover to cover, knew every name in there, and argued over whose turn it was to complete the ridiculously easy crossword puzzle in the back. I would guess that Princess Diana was in every issue of People magazine from 1991 to 1997, and we read them all.

We were camping at Mount Adams the weekend that Princess Diana died. I had gone into town with a relative that Sunday. The car pulled up to the small-town gas station and there was the newspaper box with big, black letters proclaiming the sad news.

It plays like an old movie in my head now: my 13-year-old self peering through the dusty car window, discovering this awful news through a newspaper headline. It was the last time I would learn such big news in print. Television news was already king, home computers were becoming a household staple, and cell phones were already seeping into our pockets. But back then camping still cut you off from all those things, so I had my old-fashioned news moment that day.

I woke up early to watch the funeral (this was particularly impressive since I lived on the West Coast at the time), but I set the VCR to record it just in case I missed it. When the tape finished, I labeled it: Princess Diana’s Funeral (1997), and shoved it onto the VHS shelf somewhere between X-Files and Monty Python.

It’s still there. “So, can I throw away the Princess Diana funeral tape yet?” my mom jokes every year.* “Why did you even record it in the first place?” The X-Files tapes are long gone, the smart television is logged into all the streaming services, and we don’t even know if that VCR works anymore.

I recorded it because I knew it was history. I recorded it because I had no idea how much the world would change in twenty-six years. I couldn’t foresee that I would be able to type “Princess Diana funeral” into a device that I carry in my pocket and bring up thousands of hours of footage at any time. I couldn’t fathom that someday I would own a touch screen and that I could poke at little squares and access so many Princess Diana documentaries and retrospectives. I didn’t know it was going to be a world in which newspaper boxes are hard to find, but information is not.

Princess Diana’s life, death, and funeral were always going to be a part of history; I just didn’t realize how remote it was going to seem all these years later.

*Mom, you really can throw away that VHS now!