During an emotional video, Prince Harry revealed how he dealt with grief as a child after the death of his mother, Princess Diana. Harry, 39, joined Scotty’s Little Soldiers founder, Nikki Scott, a widowed mother of two, for a candid chat about helping the children of military members through periods of grief.
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“What you’ve done is incredible,” Harry told Nikki during the conversation on Thursday, June 27. “It is truly inspirational. I know that word gets thrown around a lot, but it is. And to see the difference in some of the kids here … you can see that they’re still processing their grief, but this community of support is everything. It’s amazing.” Nikki told the story of how her husband, Corporal Lee Scott, lost his life while serving in Afghanistan in 2009.
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“It was the worst. How do you tell a 5-year-old this?” she reflected. “Because I literally just shattered his world. … He knew that life was never ever going to be the same.” Harry praised her for doing “the best that you could” when it came to telling her children the devastating news. He went on to share his own personal experience with grief and was visibly emotional while doing so.
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“You convince yourself that the person you’ve lost wants you, or you need, to be sad for as long as possible, to prove to them that they’re missed, but then there’s this realization [of], ‘No, they must want me to be happy,’” he said. Nikki broke down in tears as Harry, who served 10 years in the British Army, supported her.
“That’s the hardest thing, especially for kids, I think,” the Spare author said. “Which is, ‘I don’t want to talk about it because it will make me sad,’ but once realizing if I do talk about it, and I’m celebrating their life, then actually, things become easier. As opposed to this sort of, like ‘no I’m just not going to talk about it and that’s the best form of coping’ when in fact it’s not. It can be for a period of time, but that’s what I was saying … if you suppress this for too long, you can’t suppress this forever. It’s not sustainable and it will eat away at you inside.”
Harry was 12 years old when Diana died in a car crash at age 36 in Paris. He previously admitted that it was hard for him to accept his mother’s death in the years that followed. “For a long time. I just refused to accept that she was gone. Part of [it was] she would never do this to us. But also, part of it maybe [felt like] this is all part of a plan,” he told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes in January 2023. “For a time [I believed she was alive] and then she would call us, and we would go and join her.”
The Invictus Games founder said that he constantly looked for proof that Diana was involved in the car crash. “[I was looking mainly for] proof that she was in the car. Proof that she was injured and proof that the very paparazzi that chased her into the tunnel were the ones that were taking photographs of her lying half dead in the back [of the car],” he said. “The pictures showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking photographs through the window and the reflection on the window was them.”
In retrospect, he’s grateful for his advisor, who discouraged him from looking at the more gruesome photos taken at the scene of the accident. He shared that he believed Diana was still alive until he was 23.
“All I saw was the back of my mom’s head slumped on the back seat,” Harry said. “I will be eternally grateful to him for denying me the ability to inflict pain on myself by seeing that. Because that’s the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind forever.”
