Wish I were with Wallis Simpson in her hour of great loss, 1972

I can’t get it out of my head—the vision of the Duchess of Windsor at the Royal Burial Ground on Frogmore estate at Windsor in Berkshire on June 5, 1972, as she, wearing a plain black coat and a waist-length chiffon veil made by Hubert de Givenchy, “stood motionless, head bowed, before the coffin” of Prince Edward, the Duke of Windsor.

Equally known as Wallis Simpson, she assumed the title the Duchess of Windsor upon marrying Prince Edward, King of the United Kingdom from Jan. 20, 1936 until he abdicated the throne on Dec. 10 of the same year in order to be with her. The king’s intent to marry a commoner shocked the world, causing a public outcry and a constitutional crisis.

It was especially tough on Wallis, whom polite society, including the Royal Family, particularly the Queen Mother, deemed unworthy of the royal ruckus. She wasn’t only un-British, unroyal, and un-Anglican, she was also twice-divorced.

Oh Wallis was crucified for wanting to be queen, though if she could have her way, at least according to some biographies, like Anna Sebba’s That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, much-ballyhooed by scholars for being “too conjectural,” Wallis would have preferred to lose Edward and get back in the arms of her second husband Ernest Simpson, with whom, addressing him as her “Peter Pan,” she stayed close despite everything that happened.

In W.E., the 2011 historical drama directed by Madonna, which starred Andrea Riseborough as Wallis Simpson, there’s a quote whose gist, since I can’t be sure if it was worded this way, I also can’t forget—“In escaping his prison, he incarcerated me in my own.” Some people say Wallis Simpson saved the British from Prince Edward, who would have been a bad king.

Still, though both Edward and Wallis had been at once venerated and vilified by history, their pairing, sometimes referred to as “the greatest love story of the 20th century,” truly was one for the books. I’ve always been most curious about the secrets Wallis Simpson carried to her grave or, prior to her death at age 89 on April 4, 1986, even lost as she fell into dementia.

I read somewhere that on her bed, where she had stayed since a surgery for a stomach haemorrhage went wrong in 1977 (she also broke a hip in 1973) until her death, she had at some point forgotten about Edward, only remembering her second husband Ernest Simpson in her lucid moments.

But I always go back to Prince Edward’s funeral. I have yet to see a photo of her standing still, head bowed, before the coffin, which the New York Times described as “perhaps the most poignant few moments,” but there are tons of photos of the Duchess in her Givenchy funeral dress and all alone with her unbearable loss in the company of the Queen Mother and her niece-in-law Queen Elizabeth II.

In 2013, I wrote a 33-word essay for a weekly challenge for Trifecta, an online international community of writers. The challenge was to pick 33 words, no more, no fewer, from a page Trifecta posted, a page from Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and to use the 33 words to write something.

Most of the entries were fiction, but I chose to write about what I imagined to be running in the mind of the Duchess of Windsor during the funeral. What I wrote placed second in the competition. This is how it goes: Leave them where they are / She shouted with panic but quietly / A sense of umbrage pricked her / The remnants, all she wanted / Peering for any signs of comforting quiescence / But no relief came