Harry shares his grief to reclaim his mother
Prince Harry’s decades of buried pain show how public mourning stole Diana from her sons, writes Sarah Caden
LAST Tuesday, following an interview in which Prince Harry revealed how he “shut down all his emotions” in the two decades after his mother’s death in 1997, there was one photograph that appeared over and over.
It was of Harry, then 12 and still little-boyish, standing between his father Prince Charles and his brother Prince William (then 14) as the hearse containing their mother’s coffin passed by. All three of them are gazing at the flower-topped coffin, Charles with a look of horror, and the boys with expressions that were close to furious. Both appeared tense with anger, tightly wound, pent up, you might say.
It is, in part, with the benefit of hindsight that you can read anger in their expressions. That hindsight is informed by Harry’s openness last week in explaining and expressing his decades of unlocked grief that by his 20s drove him to the point where he was “on the verge of punching someone”. He was filled with anxiety, behaving badly and filled with an aggression he eventually channelled into boxing.
Harry buried his head in the sand, he said, and only in recent times, with his brother’s encouragement, finally sought professional help. This openness, so utterly un-stiffupper-lip, made headlines all over the world, and a hero of Harry. But it also caused us to resurrect the images from the time when his trauma began. We saw all of those images afresh and, perhaps, we saw them a little differently.
How often have we seen that picture of those boys in the almost 20 years since Diana’s death? And the others: the young princes following the hearse, the young princes entering the Abbey, the young princes surveying the flowers left by the public outside Kensington Palace?
It’s hard not to feel uncomfortable now about how we stared at them then and how, in a weird way, those photographs have become part of the cultural furniture since.
What Harry reminded us last week was that Diana was his mother.
He was a little boy who already had probably absorbed far too much adult stuff from the very public breakdown of his parents’ marriage, and who now had lost his mother. And not after an illness with a goodbye at its end, but suddenly and violently, the news of which was broken to him by his father who woke him in the middle of the night and delivered him into a waking nightmare.
We cannot be surprised at how he buried his grief when we consider these details. But we should wonder what part was played by what has been known since as “the public outpouring of grief ”.
We should question the wisdom of Tony Blair and his “People’s Princess” appropriation of Diana for everyone. We should wonder if a little boy’s grief might have been made a bit easier if his mother hadn’t been taken twice from him; once in the Paris tunnel, and then again by the world that mourned while he felt that he couldn’t.
As we look back now, it seems the Queen might have been on the right track — from a grandmotherly point-ofview — when she kept quiet about Diana in those days after her death. Always, this was explained as an effort on the Queen’s part to focus on her grandsons, but as the national and international grieving for Diana built to fever pitch, she was compelled to say something.
The unprecedented passion that followed Diana’s death meant that the usual rules did not apply. In 1997, the public outpouring of grief was something we’d never seen before. The bouquets with cards bearing highly emotional messages from strangers, the crying in the streets, the heartfelt assertions of people that they were personally devastated by her death; these were extraordinary then.
And now, weirdly, they’re fairly commonplace.
Last week, quite rightly, Prince Harry was commended for his honesty and openness about his mother’s death and how he has dealt with it, or not dealt with it. In part, he took this step as part of his support of Heads Together, a UK charity working to dispel the stigma surrounding mental health. Almost universally, he was applauded for speaking up about something that people find difficult to admit, thus, it is hoped, making it easier for others.
He is to be applauded and encouraged, of course, but it seems so odd that speaking out can be so difficult in a world that just won’t shut up. Modern culture is relentlessly talkative, commenting on everything, cataloguing and sharing its every move. This makes the effect of Harry’s actions even more significant, though. What he highlights is not only the importance of talking about mental health, but differentiating between what really matters and what is just chatter.
What really mattered, we see now, is that two little boys lost their mother. What didn’t matter so much was that the world lost Diana. Yes, it was sad, but we didn’t lose her, we didn’t know her, we didn’t grieve her. But by appropriating her, we played a part in preventing her son from grieving her.
What we might also see now is that Diana’s death set something in motion. It is now par for the course for the death of a public person to trigger an outpouring of grief.
Online RIPs, complete with high emotion that suggests the writer’s own life will be altered and damaged by this death. Piles of flowers left at the scene of a death or the home of the deceased — and not by people who knew them but by people who feel affected by the event. It’s not cynical and it is heartfelt, but that doesn’t stop it from being misplaced.
The effect of the culture of communal grieving born out of Diana’s death is also to take it from the nearest and dearest of the deceased. The dead person becomes public property, the near competitive extent of strangers’ emotions are almost impossible to compete with. Those who should be feeling it most feel that they can’t possibly trump the trauma of complete strangers.
We are a culture of grief thieves, and Prince Harry may have been the first casualty.
‘Yes, it was sad, but we didn’t lose her, we didn’t know her’