The Duke of Sussex spoke about his difficult grieving process after the death of his mother, who died in a car accident when he was 12 years old.
Prince Harry speaks emotionally about the loss of his mother, Lady Diana. During a filmed conversation with Nikki Scott, founder of a British charity helping children who have lost a parent in a military context, the Duke of Sussex spoke of the death of the Princess of Wales, who died in 1997 at 36 years old in a car accident in Paris.
“I know what I’m talking about, I was 12 years old,” the prince first declared in this exchange published on YouTube this Thursday, June 27.
“We convince ourselves that the person we lost wants or needs us to be sad as long as possible, to prove to them that we miss them,” he explained. “Then comes the moment when you realize that she can only want you to be happy.”
“If we talk about it, things become easier”
Prince Harry also spoke of the difficulty for young people to talk about their grief: “It’s the most difficult, especially for children. (We say to ourselves:) ‘I don’t want to talk about it because it makes me makes you sad’. Then you realize that if you talk about it and celebrate their life, then things become easier.”
“You can’t suppress this forever. It’s not sustainable, and it’s eating away at you from the inside.”
Nikki Scott founded Scotty’s Little Soldiers in 2010 to help the children of military personnel who have died in the line of duty. The previous year, she had lost Lee Scott, known as Scotty, her husband and father of her son, in Afghanistan.
Prince Harry has spoken out on numerous occasions in recent years about the drama he experienced at 12 years old and the consequences on his life as a teenager and young adult.
“The loss of my mother at such a young age, the trauma I suffered, I was never really aware of it,” he said in 2023 in the documentary series he produced for Netflix, titled Invictus, the medals of resilience. “We never talked about it, I never really talked about it, and I suppressed it like most young people would have done.”
In 2021, he also confided that he turned to drugs and alcohol between the ages of 128 and 32 to try to forget his discomfort.
