The disappearance of his mother gave Prince Harry a nightmare. In a video posted on YouTube, he recounts the difficult path he had to take to successfully grieve.
A death that marked Prince Harry
August 31, 1997 is a dark date for the British royal family. That day, Lady Diana lost her life following from a car accident. For his two sons, Princes Harry and William, the news was a real shock. Very touched by this tragedy, they initially had difficulty accepting the truth.
Prince Harry notably experienced a nightmare at the time. Indeed, when his father told him the news, Meghan Markle’s husband hesitated to believe him. “He sat on the edge of the bed. He placed a hand on my knee. ‘My darling boy, mommy had a car accident”, he writes in his work The Substitute.
The Duke of Sussex thought his mother had pulled through. He refused to believe that he would never be able to see her again. The prince said:
I remember thinking: accident… OK. But is she okay? Yes ? I remember very well this thought crossing my mind. And I remember waiting patiently for Dad to confirm that Mom was okay.
Unfortunately, William’s brother will never hear these words. He then understands that his mother was never coming back. “He put his hand on my knee and said, ‘It’s going to be okay.’ It was a lot for him. Fatherly, hopeful, kind. But so wrong”, he confided.
Difficult grief
Prince Harry had a hard time grieving. Indeed, he spent years denying reality. Sadness will even push him to ask for photos of Lady Di’s body. In 2007, he also made an improbable request to his driver.
While in his car, Lilibet’s father asks the driver to cross the Alma bridge at 104 km/h. As a reminder, this is where his mother had died a few years earlier. He explained:
As the car entered the tunnel, I leaned forward, watched the light turn a kind of orange, looked at the concrete pillars. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and within seconds we were out (…) I said, ‘Is that it?’ I had always imagined the tunnel as a treacherous passage, dangerous by nature, but it was just a short, simple tunnel, without any frills.
In a video posted on YouTube, this Thursday, June 27, 2024, the Duke of Sussex spoke of the long mourning work that he did and which had a huge impact on him. He explains in the sequence:
You convince yourself that the person you lost expects you to be sad as long as possible to show them how much you miss them. Then you realize no, she wants you to be happy.
And to continue:
It’s the hardest thing, especially for a child, to say, ‘I don’t want to talk about this because it will make me sad,’ but once I realize that by talking about it I’m celebrating their life, suddenly things become easier.
A difficult ordeal that he managed to overcome after a long fight.
