The grief is genuine. The admiration for the woman who has been an emblem of a nation for so many decades is deeply sincere. There will be appreciation for the great care she took in such a fractious age not to take a side, express a view or add to the rifts that sharply divide the country. Every nation needs a figurehead; and, however perverse the sheer randomness of being born into that role, she did it with remarkable skill and dignity. How fitting that she should die just after performing her final and most important constitutional role, appointing a prime minister (her 15th). How glad many will be that she lived to see the last hurrah of her platinum jubilee. There’s no tragedy in the death of 96-year-old who kept going to the very last. Isn’t that the way we all wish to go? We never knew her, hidden as she was behind that distant facade of royalty. But everyone could imagine her as they chose. So many have measured their families, births, marriages and deaths, the growing up of their children, the passing of their grandmothers, against those royal events. So many wondered how she navigated her troublesome children, with their many divorces and scandals. Some families saw their own soap operas reflected back at them. The grief people feel will be for all those losses and changes in their own families over the years. As a young child, my mother saw the Queen held up as a baby at Windsor for all to see. I dimly remember standing in a park in the cold foggy early morning, waiting for her father’s funeral. I first watched TV at a friend’s house for the coronation. We were nearly crushed in Hyde Park with my children watching fireworks on the evening before Charles and Diana’s wedding. Royalist or not, their comings and goings echo through our own lives. There will be grief, too, for the vanishing of an era – or many eras, one after another, as she has been on the throne so long. Time passing makes us melancholy: we grieve for ourselves, too. The hazy notion of an Elizabethan age marks out our personal and national histories. She was the last link with the war, with those pictures of her in uniform. Her reprise of “We will meet again” in her Covid broadcast was a touching elegy for those more communally minded, wartime days. Her reign saw the end of empire, those pink slabs of the world in my old geography book, with the Commonwealth – that curious remnant she tenaciously clung to – now all that’s left. No doubt we will see public mourning on an epic scale, and sonorous worship of the mystique of monarchy from the BBC. Cameras will seek out in the crowds the most profuse weepers. But the true mood, I suspect, is a more personal sense of family memories and the passing of private as well as public histories. Reigns are milestones in our lives: Shakespeare had ordinary folk marking their own memories as being in the time of this or that king. Everyone has their own patriotism, their own way of expressing their love of home, their own reasons to revel in a thousand aspects of this country. Queen Elizabeth, because she spans as much time as most people can remember, lays claim to a sense of country that may not be matched in future. She did everything she had to do. Most important of all to her was to pass on the crown to the next three kings lined up into the far future. She steered her wayward family “firm” skilfully through 70 years of change and tumult. Now, with a “Vivat rex!”, there has been not a split second after her last breath for anyone to consider. That is how she planned it, why she never abdicated to retire in old age. The magic of majesty is in its divine destiny. Let in choice, and all is lost. She reigned so well that there has never been a time when the people, if asked, would have chosen anyone but her. “Impossible act to follow”, opines one royal author to BBC News. I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way, but he could be right. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist