We've mocked, pitied or tried to ignore her for nearly seven years – now we know Jade Goody is dying, how does that make us feel?

SO MAYBE you didn't stand outside the Big Brother House chanting "Burn the Pig" at a 21-year-old girl you'd never met, at least let's hope you didn't. But, in the seven years since Jade Goody first squealed and blubbed her way into our lives, exposing her ignorance and intimate body parts at the slightest provocation, you've almost certainly expressed an opinion on her at some point – and it probably wasn't a kind one.

Her autobiography and perfume may have been bestsellers, but she's rarely been described as anything better than talentless, ugly, a disgrace, a bad mum, a racist, a symptom of everything that's wrong with today's celebrity-obsessed society, a waste of space.

Well, now we know she's not going to be "wasting space" very much longer, because that risible figure – the girl who turned a traumatic childhood of drug-dealers, pimps, and shocking lack of education into a traumatic adulthood of sex exposs, jailed boyfriends and race rows – is dying.

The "alleged cancer", as some commentators gleefully described it when news of her illness first gained her yet another tabloid front page, has spread from her cervix to other organs and doctors have said the 27-year-old mother of two will not recover.

So now, as we approach our first "reality death" how do we all feel? Sad, ashamed, confused that we care? But is it possible not to care? We might never have met her, but we know more about this woman than we do about most of our day-to-day acquaintances and some of our friends: reality television has made sure of that.

Jade, being – in economic and newspaper coverage terms, if no other – the most successful reality TV star so far, has carved a place in our consciousness: not through merit, she will leave no legacy of artistic creation or political change that would lead us naturally to mourn a lost inspiration, but simply through familiarity.

We've seen her drunk and naked, we've read about or even seen images of her engaged in regrettable sex acts, watched her rage, and more recently we've looked on her contorted face as she was told on camera first of her cancer and then, this week, that she would soon die.

Yet it is a familiarity that birthed contempt and surely it is foolish, hypocritical, self-indulgent even, to feel sad about the demise of a woman few admire and many have reviled; as if she suddenly becomes loveable simply because she's dying. If we found the hysteria provoked by the death of Diana a distasteful over-reaction, can we justifiably wallow in tragedy at the imminent demise of a woman who, far from being declared the People's Princess was so shamefully made – courtesy of Channel 4 executives, her own foolishness, and our superior voyeurism – the People's Pig?

Of course we cannot, this is not a weepy movie, or soap tear-jerker over which we can release a few pent-up emotions. Nor should we confuse grief with guilt. Any shame we may feel over our judgemental attitude towards Jade in the past cannot be assuaged by a few grim faces and "isn't it awful"s now.

While some have sought out every gory detail of this young woman's tawdry lifestyle and will relish its tragic climax, others – confused as to how respond to reality mourning – will perhaps feel aggrieved in some way to have grief forced upon them. In so relentlessly exposing her life to us, Jade has forced us to witness and share the pain of her dying too, whether we want to be part of that or not, and it is very difficult to read of any young person dying without feeling upset, especially one we know will leave two boys, aged just five and four, motherless.

We do not know yet whether Jade will invite the cameras to her deathbed. It would not be at all surprising if she does. Having lived out every moment of her short adult life in the public eye, why should she want to hide the most dramatic thing that will ever happen to her? For a woman for whom – understandably, given a childhood of emotional neglect – attention has been the principal goal in life, perhaps these cameras will actually bring some comfort to her final moments.

Dignity does not come naturally to Jade and it can be hard to keep our own when reading or talking about her. As florists gear up for the inevitable rush of bouquets, to be left at her door when she dies along with twee notes from those who vilified her when she was alive, the best we can do is avoid hypocrisy . We should not do her, or ourselves, the disservice of indulging in a shallow sense of loss or pretence that we admire her or like the manner in which she became part of our lives. Yet part of our lives she has become and, in dealing with conflicting emotions around her final days, we must remember that the "reality" in all of this is a scared young woman, dying in pain and leaving two children bereft. Lack of admiration is no reason to ration our sympathy.

Jade recognised she was unlikely to ever be a beloved celebrity. "I'm not like that. I don't expect anything," she said in an interview back in 2006. Instead what she really wanted was that by the time she was 50 she'd "be retired, living in a big house, with my kids grown up, happily married to a man who puts me on a pedestal". That's never going to happen now. And for Jade and her family, the reality of that is very sad indeed.