Prince Harry has detailed his heartbreaking experience with grief during a conversation with a military widow who had to break the news of her husband’s death to their 5-year-old son.
The Duke of Sussex, 39, sat down with Nikki Scott, the founder of Scotty’s Little Soldiers — a charity for bereaved military children — on Wednesday, where he detailed what it was like losing his mother, the late Princess Diana.
Harry and his estranged brother Prince William’s late mother died in a car crash in August 1997 at the age of 36 while fleeing photographers in Paris.
Recalling the tragedy, Harry, who was 12 years old at the time, said “things become easier” if children are able to talk about grief.
Scott, for her part, recalled telling her 5-year-old son that his father, Corporal Lee Scott, had been killed in Afghanistan.
“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 are missed,” Harry said in a video ahead of Armed Forces Day.
“But then there’s this realization of, no they must want me to be happy.”
Scott said she broke the news of her husband’s death to her son in July 2009 while caring for her 7-month-old daughter.
“It was the worst,” she told the royal. “How do you tell a five-year-old this? I took him up and sat him on the bed and I said, ‘Kai, do you remember where Daddy was?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, Afghan’, and I said, ‘Something really bad has happened and the baddies (because he used to play Army) have hurt dad and he’s died.’”
Harry, who served as an Apache helicopter pilot in Afghanistan, stressed the importance of letting children speak freely about their emotions.
“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 realizing if I do talk about it, and I’m celebrating their life, then actually, 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,’” he said.
“It can be for a period of time. If you suppress this for too long, you cannot suppress it for ever, it is not sustainable and it will eat away at you inside.”
Harry, who also serves as the Global Ambassador for Scotty’s Little Soldiers, gave Scott a hug at the end of the emotional conversation.