Prince Harry Says Burying Grief ‘Will Eat Away at You’

Prince Harry is continuing to reflect on the grief he experienced as a child following the death of his mother, Princess Diana. During a recent trip to London, he talked about the pain of losing a parent with Nikki Scott, the founder of Scotty’s Little Soldiers, a charity that helps kids who lost a parent serving in the British military.

“It’s so easy as a kid to think or convince yourself — I would know, I was 12 — that you need to be sad for as long as possible to prove to them that they’re missed,” Harry said in a video of the conversation released by the charity this week. “But then there’s this realization that they must want me to be happy.” Diana died in a car crash in Paris in 1996 when Harry was 12 years old, and he  has spoken at length about how losing her at such a young age affected him.

Harry asked Scott how she told her 5-year-old that his father, Corporal Lee Scott, had died in combat in Afghanistan. She said, “It shattered his world. It was the worst.” Harry has been an ambassador for Scotty’s Little Soldiers since 2017, attending its events, including one where he dressed up as Santa Claus. He said “the hardest part” of coping with the loss of a parent is not wanting to talk about their death out of fear of sadness. But, he said, over time, you realize that talking about them is a way of “celebrating their life,” and the more you do it, “things become easier, as opposed to this, ‘I am just not going to talk about it and that’s best form of coping,’ when in fact it’s not.”

Harry also told Scott that on his recent visit, he told the children affiliated with the charity that they shouldn’t hold back their feelings. “If you suppress it for too long, you can’t suppress it forever; it’s not sustainable. It will eat away at you.”

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