It’s been over 28 years since Princess Diana’s death, and it still has a profound effect on her sons. Prince William and Prince Harry have talked about how they found out about their mother’s untimely death.
The brothers were with their father in Balmoral Castle in Scotland when they found out about Diana’s car crash. “I remember waiting patiently for Pa to confirm that, indeed, Mummy was all right,” Harry wrote in his memoir Spare. “And I remember him not doing that.”
The brothers were told that their mother “didn’t make it”: “These phrases remain in my mind like darts in a board,” Harry added. “He did say it that way, I know that much for sure. She didn’t make it. And then everything seemed to come to a stop.”
Their father, King Charles, tried to support his sons amid all the chaos, with Harry recalling in the documentary, Diana, he “was there for us—he was the one out of two left, and he tried to do his best and to make sure that we were protected and looked after. But he was going through the same grieving process, as well.”
“There was no sudden outpour of grief,” he continued. “I don’t think anybody in that position at that age would be able to understand the concept of what that actually means going forward.”
When revisiting the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 2022, William recalled the moments shortly after their father told them, “I was in Balmoral when I was told that my mother had died. Still in shock, I found sanctuary in the service at Crathie Kirk that very morning. And in the dark days of grief that followed, I found comfort and solace in the Scottish outdoors. As a result, the connection I feel to Scotland will forever run deep.”
“You feel very, very confused,” William said about his feelings of grief. “And you keep asking yourself, ‘Why me?’ All the time. ‘Why? What have I done? Why? Why has this happened to us?’”
William appreciated that his grandmother Queen Elizabeth to let them stay in Scotland as it allowed them to grieve away from distractions.“At the time, my grandmother wanted to protect her two grandsons and my father, as well,” William said in the same documentary. “Our grandmother deliberately removed the newspapers and things like that so there was nothing in the house to read.”
“We didn’t know what was going on,” he continued. “Back then there were no smartphones and things like that, so you couldn’t get your news. Thankfully, we had the privacy to mourn and to try to collect our thoughts and have that space away from everybody. We had no idea the reaction to her death would be quite so huge.”