For more than 70 years, I lived under the same head of state: not a despot, of the kind who clings to power for fear of ending up like Mussolini, suspended by the ankles from a gibbet; but a mild, glamorous, modest, dutiful, humorous woman who understood and performed her role to perfection and never, in all that time, made a faux pas.
After so long a period, she came to seem almost immortal, her presence taken for granted, as one takes a phenomenon of nature for granted. Toward the end of her life, however, when it became clear that she must die in the not-distant future, a number of people I know—my neighbors and others—expressed anxiety at the thought of her death: for when we have lived for so long with a seemingly fixed point, its removal, even if it is distant from us, is unsettling. For those grown old during her reign, change seemed unlikely to be for the better and chaos more than possible, given that so little goes uncontested these days.
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