Prince Harry was 12 when Lady Diana died. Shocking photos and a confidential document would later help him grieve. We tell you that!
It was a thunderclap that fell on Buckingham Palace on August 31, 1997 on learning of the death of Lady Diana. The Princess of Wales has just lost her life following a car accident in the middle of the night under the Alma bridge, in the heart of Paris. A cardiac massage was not enough to revive the one who recently shared Charles’ life. In the midst of a conspiratorial controversy, Prince Harry barely understands the event that upsets the crown. In his memoirs entitled The Alternate, the Duke of Sussex evokes remembers the shock photos of the paparazzi revealing”the back of the head [de sa mère]slumped in the back seat“.”I think at that time, I was looking for evidence that it actually happened“Explains today the son of Lady Diana in an interview with ITV. The proof that she had been in the car, that she had been injured.”
Prince Harry says: “I was also looking for pain because at that time I was still pretty numb to it all. It was, once again, my body, my nervous system in a way, which stopped.“A memory more than twenty years old still comes to mind, that of Charles breaking into his room at Balmoral to whisper in his ear:”Honey, mom had a car accident“. The 12-year-old would then have waited for his father to reassure him about his mother’s state of health. But the Prince of Wales “didn’t do it“. Harry would only mourn his mother onceat his funeral at Westminster Abbey on September 6, 1997.
This photo of Prince Harry that Lady Diana took away
The streets of London were “invaded by the most immense crowd that this immemorial city has ever seen”, remembers Prince Harry. He then walks headlong alongside his older brother William and his father. No overflow of emotion is allowed. The crown requires dignity and restraint. Harry finds it all the more difficult to contain his tears because “certain witnesses“reported to him having a photo of him and his brother in the hands of his mother in the coffin before him. “Perhaps the only two men she had truly loved, comments on the “Substitute” in his memoirs. The ones she had loved the most anyway, without a doubt.” Harry will go years later to the scene of the accident. “It was a very bad one, he wrote. I had had a lot of bad ideas in 23 years, but this one was particularly unhealthy.” The Alma bridge remains to this day a place of pilgrimage and meditation for admirers of Lady Diana.