Hope you’re ready for a good cry ….
Because it’s coming, whether you like it or not.
As you’ve probably heard, this year marks the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s untimely death.
On August 31st, 1997, she was killed in a car crash in Paris, leaving behind her two young sons, Princes William and Harry.
This year, and this summer in particular, many people are taking some time to remember Diana, since she really was such a beloved public figure.
That means that William and Harry are pretty much obligated to talk about their late mother in interview after interview.
In the latest one, for a televised special called Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, set to air tomorrow in the UK, the two princes remembered the last time they every spoke to her.
Brace yourselves …
The last conversation between Diana and her sons was a phone call, they revealed.
They were staying with their father, Prince Charles, at Balmoral, a royal estate in Scotland, when she called them.
“At the time Harry and I were running around minding our own business, you know, playing with our cousins and having a very good time,” William says.
Harry adds that “As a kid I never enjoyed speaking to my parents on the phone. And we spent far too much time speaking on the phone rather than speaking to each other, because of the way the situation was.”
It’s already too sad, right?
Harry continues the story, saying that when the phone rang, William “went to go and speak to her sort of for five minutes.”
“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,” William explains.
“If I’d known now obviously what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have been so blasé about it and everything else.”
“But,” he says, “that phone call sticks in my mind quite, quite heavily.”
As for Harry, he says that “I can’t really necessarily remember what I said, but all I do remember is probably, you know, regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was.”
It’s just so sad because when Diana died, William was 15 years old, and Harry was 12.
At that age, of course kids don’t want to sit down to have a long, meaningful conversation with their mother, especially over the phone.
It’s definitely understandable, and no one would fault them for it, but now they have to live with the fact that their last conversation with her wasn’t what they might want it to have been.
Speaking more generally about Diana, William says that “There are not many days that go by that I don’t think of her.”
“Her 20th anniversary year feels like a good time to remember all the good things about her and hopefully provide maybe a different side that others haven’t seen before.”
“It was that love,” Harry adds, “that even if she was on the side of the room, as her son, you could feel it.”
“So there’s you know, there’s a lot of … there’s a lot of grief that still needs to be let out.”
He’s definitely not lying — he also says that he’s only cried over the loss of his mother twice since her death.
Hopefully this new tradition of William and Harry being so open and honest about their feelings, even these very tough ones, will help them heal from what had to have been an extremely traumatic loss.