In the years following Princess Diana’s fatal car crash on August 31, 1997, her sons, Prince William, and Prince Harry remained notably silent about her tragic death, refusing to make any sort of official statement about their grief. But more recently, the boys have started to open up about their mother to the press.
In 2017, Diana’s sons used the HBO documentary, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, as a platform to open up about what it was like to lose her at such a young age.
For the young princes—William, then age 15, and Harry, then age 12—their last interaction with their mother came in the form of a phone conversation—something that had become a nightly occurrence after Diana’s split with Prince Charles.
“I can’t really, necessarily, remember what I said,” Harry said in Diana, Our Mother. “But all I do remember is probably, you know, regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was. And if I’d known that was the last time I was going to speak to my mother—the things I would have said to her.”
When news of Diana’s death reached her family, William and Harry were devastated. “There’s nothing like it in the world,” William said. “There really isn’t. It’s like an earthquake has just run through the house and through your life and everything. Your mind is completely split. And it took me a while for it to actually sink in.”
Just a few days later, on September 6, an estimated 2.5 billion people around the world watched Diana’s funeral, as a young William and Harry stoically walked behind her cortège.
In an interview with Newsweek, Harry explained how difficult it was for him to handle the news of his mother’s death. “My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television,” said Harry, now 32. “I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances. I don’t think it would happen today.”
Immediately following Diana’s death, the royal family made attempts to engage the young princes in conversation about their mother’s passing. “The family came together and Harry and I tried to talk as best we could about it,” William said in the newly-released documentary. “But being so small at that age, it was very difficult to communicate or understand your feelings. It’s…it’s very complicated.”
For young Prince Harry, tears over his mother’s passing were put on hold in favor of shock. At only 12 years old, he couldn’t understand how his mother—who took him to soccer games and snuck him out every now and then for a burger or a movie—could mean so much to so many people he’d never even met.
“It was very, very strange after her death, you know, the sort of outpouring of love and emotion from so many people that had never even met her,” Harry said in Diana, Our Mother. “… And I was thinking to myself, how is it that so many people that never even met this woman, my mother, can be crying and showing more emotion than I actually am feeling?”
Diana was buried on a small island in the middle of the Oval Lake at the Althorp Estate, her family home. “The first time I cried was at the funeral on the island…and only since then, maybe once,” Harry said in the documentary. “So, you know, there’s a lot of grief that still needs to be let out.”
