Prince Harry has spoken movingly about his experiences with grief following the death of his mother, Princess Diana.
The Duke of Sussex spoke to Nikki Scott, a military widow who founded the charity Scotty’s Little Soldiers in 2010 after her husband, Corporal Lee Scott, died in Afghanistan. The charity supports children whose parents have been killed during military service.
In an emotionally charged conversation, Scott told the Prince about the moment she had to tell her five-year-old son, Kai, that his father had died, describing the pain of ‘shattering [her] son’s world’ while also caring for her seven-month-old daughter, Brooke. Prince Harry, who has been an outspoken advocate for mental health over the past decade, told Scott that he understood how it felt to grieve for a parent, having experienced the death of his mother, the late Princess of Wales, when he was aged just 12.
‘It’s so easy as a kid to think or convince yourself … that the person you’ve lost wants you [to], or you need to be sad for as long as possible to prove to them that they are missed. But then there’s this realisation of, “no, they must want me to be happy,”’ he said.
The Duke of Sussex has spoken out about the lack of support he felt from his family in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, as well as the trauma of walking behind his mother’s hearse during her funeral. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey for the 2021 documentary The Me You Can’t See, Harry admitted that the repression of his grief led to substance abuse. ‘I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs,’ he said at the time, ‘I was willing to try and do the things that made me feel less like I was feeling.’
It’s tempting to think, the Prince told Scott, that bottling up grief is the best coping mechanism after the death of a loved one: ‘No-one wants to be in the position where they are forced to talk about the very thing they don’t want to talk about, especially when every defence mechanism in your mind, nervous system and everything else is saying “do not go there”.’
He went on to say that repression can often be harmful for a grieving person’s mental health, telling Scott that ‘you can’t suppress it forever. It’s not sustainable. And [it] will eat away at you inside.’
He said: ‘That’s the hardest thing, especially for kids, I think, which is, “I don’t want to talk about it because it will make me sad,” but once realising that “if I do talk about it, I’m celebrating their life,” then actually, things become easier”
The interview with Scott was conducted in May, during the Duke of Sussex’s last trip to the UK, when he met with some of the children receiving support from Scotty’s Little Soldiers. It was released yesterday in the run-up to Armed Forces Day on 29th June.
‘What you’ve done is incredible,’ he told Scott, before the two embraced at the end of their powerful conversation.
‘It is truly inspirational. I’m really honoured and privileged to be part of Scotty’s now, and I really look forward to us doing everything we can to bring in more people, more interest, raise more funds and be able to get the message out there to get more kids the support they so desperately need.’