10th Anniversary of Princess Diana's Death Highlights the Late Princess and her "Soother-in-Chief"

In The Diana Chronicles Tina Brown's best selling biography of the late Princess Diana, Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo is referred to as "Diana's soother in chief."

Though the book is very, very good, Diana's relationship to her spiritual confidants, healers, and astrologer (the exceptional Debbie Frank) was more or less dismissed in a condescending way by the author. Too bad, Diana had some wonderful people to confide in, and they helped her enormously...more than the general public realizes. They always had her best interests at heart.

It's hard to believe, but August 31 2007 marks the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's shocking death. In her inspiring 2002 memoir, The Voice of Silence, former nun, midwife, and acupuncturist, Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo, who turns 78 on August 15th, tells of her childhood in Ireland, her training in Chinese medicine, her own brush with death, miraculous recovery, leaving the convent, her marriage, and her work with the Princess, and Edward VIII, a/ka/ The Duke of Windsor.

Prophetically, Diana said to Oonagh soon after they met: "If anything should happen to me, would you please tell the world who I really was, and not the person who they made me out to be."

After they met on September 6, 1989, Oonagh wrote in her diary: "Diana has a mission in the world to help humanity." It was Oonagh, through her own experiences in Calcutta, who would soon introduce Diana to the work of Mother Theresa. Neither could have fathomed that 8 years later to the day, Mother Theresa would have just passed and the world would be transfixed watching Diana's funeral.

It was in 1995, when visiting Oonagh's ailing husband Joseph (in the hospital) that Diana first met and fell in love with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, the man who she adored for two years. The break-up with Khan (who shunned publicity) in 1997 and Charles' growing public display of his relationship with Camilla that summer threw Diana into the liaison with Dodi Fayed.