Indeed, the last two decades of the last century saw Elizabeth having to adroitly navigate the choppy waters splashed, ironically, by her own royal children. The similarly spectacular divorce “show” put on by Charles and Diana was enervating enough to the British royal family, but there were similar marital troubles involving Prince Andrew and Princess Anne as well. Then there was Diana’s accidental death in the Paris river tunnel in 1997. An eerie feeling climbed up on me when I first heard the tragic news as I entered my then California home and switched on the television after a long working trip abroad. I was walking by that very tunnel barely a week before. The queen’s initial reaction to Diana’s death was her signature matter-of-fact tone, but as popular, sympathetic sentiments surged, she again laid out a splendid funeral for Diana to assuage public yearnings. Similarly, in recent years, as Prince Andrew was enveloped in a scandal, and Prince Harry decided to take a rebellious turn with his American wife, the queen was quick and resolute in cutting them off from royal duties, despite them being long viewed as her familial favorites among her descendants. Elizabeth always distinguished her own personal feelings from her official duties — with the latter always trumping the former — and was always quick to shore up the sanctity and by extending the longevity of the British monarchy.

I was attending the Commonwealth Magistrates and Judges Association conference — to which Queen Elizabeth was a royal patron — in Accra, Ghana, two weeks ago. As a justice of the peace, I qualify as a magistrate and am indeed a council member of the association. At the close of the conference, we were invited to attend a gala dinner at Jubilee House, the presidential palace. As we were supposed to wear national costume, I donned the traditional black and gold-trimmed Kadazan costume of Sabah, complete with conspicuous headgear. Throughout the day we learned that Queen Elizabeth was unwell, despite having received the new British prime minister barely two days earlier. When we boarded the bus, we were hit with the sad news that the queen had passed on. The dinner was understandably canceled, and we took our respective time to mourn the passing of our patron. It was indeed characteristic of the duty-minded queen that she performed her last official act almost toward the last hours of her long life, and doing so standing up despite her frail state, in full dignity and with a smile.

Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral was of course another grand affair, with many foreign heads of state and government attending. But what impressed me the most was during the subsequent family funeral in Windsor, when toward the end, the camera turned to a lone piper in a Scottish kilt playing his bagpipe as he walked slowly away into the adjacent yard of the chapel, as if into the long river of history. The concomitant lowering of the queen’s coffin into the underground vault, however, was not shown on television. Elizabeth, in death as in life, was always discreet and mindful of her place in history.