Why Prince William and Prince Harry Are Still Haunted By Their Last Phone Call With Princess Diana
Princess Diana died more than two decades ago but today people are still fascinated with her life. The princess’s sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, have carried on their mother’s legacy and previously opened up about what they went through after her tragic death on Aug. 31, 1997.
One of the things they admitted is that they are still haunted by the last conversation they ever had with her. Here’s why the two princes say they have regrets about their last phone call with their mom and why they were so surprised by the public’s reaction to her death.
The princes’ last phone call with their mother
The final time William and Harry spoke to Diana still haunts them to this day because they believe they rushed her off the phone.
The princes were just 15 and 12 when she died and were staying at the royal family’s Balmoral estate in Scotland when they got what ended up being the last phone call from her.
“The very last memory that I have is a phone call [at] Balmoral,” William revealed in the documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy . “At the time Harry and I were running around minding our own business, playing with our cousins and having a very good time. I think Harry and I were just in a desperate rush to say goodbye. You know, see you later and we’re going to go off.”
The Duke of Cornwall and Cambridge added that he wished he would have known he wasn’t going to talk to his mother after that.
“If I’d known now obviously what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blasé about it. That phone call sticks in my mind quite heavily,” he admitted.
Harry also spoke about the phone call that day.
He remembered William telling him, “Harry, Harry, mummy’s on the phone.” Harry then recalled thinking, “Right my turn, off I go, you know, pick up the phone. It was her speaking from Paris. I can’t really necessarily remember what I said, but all I do remember is regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was.”
The Duke of Sussex agreed with his brother that he would have handled the call differently if he knew that was the last time he was ever going to speak to her saying, “If I’d known that that was the last time … the things I would have said to her.”
What they really thought of the public’s reaction to her death
In that same documentary, the princes also remembered that they were taken aback by how the public reacted to Diana’s death.
“It was very, very strange after her death, the sort of outpouring of love and emotion from so many people that had never even met her,” Harry said. “And I was thinking to myself, how is it that so many people who never met this woman, my mother, can be crying and showing more emotion than I actually am feeling?”
Harry also confessed that he only cried twice since his mother passed.
“The first time I cried was at the funeral on the island,” he revealed. “And only since then maybe once.”
The prince continued, “I think it was a classic case of don’t let yourself think about your mum and the grief and the hurt that comes with it, because it’s never going to bring her back and it’s only going to make you more sad. People deal with grief in different ways and my way of dealing with it was by just basically shutting it out, locking it out.”
As for William, he said he was in shock about his mother’s death even years after it happened.
“Slowly you try to rebuild your life and I kept saying to myself that my mother would not want me to be upset, she’d not want me to be down, to be like this,” William explained. “I kept myself busy as well, which is good and bad sometimes but allows you to kind of get through that initial shock phase. We’re talking as much as maybe five to seven years afterwards.”
He added, “There’s not many days that go by that I don’t think of her — sometimes sad, sometimes very positively. My mother lives with me every day.”
Read more: These Are the Names Princess Diana Would Not Let Prince Charles Give Their Sons
