Prince Harry Didn’t Believe Princess Diana Died For “Many, Many Years” And Used Psychedelics To Treat Grief
The Duke revealed this and more about the royal family in his new memoir, 'Spare,' which is out today.
Of the many facets of Prince Harry’s life that are explored in Spare, the Duke of Sussex dedicates a large portion of his memoir to his relationship with his late mother, Princess Diana who was tragically killed in a 1997 car accident in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. She was 36 years old. Harry was 12 at the time.
In Spare (out now!), Harry opens up about his years-long journey with grief. After recounting how he found out about her death, the Duke says he didn’t believe it to be real. Moreover, he — and Prince William, he added — thought the whole thing was a ruse to help his mother escaped from the UK tabloids.
Speaking with Anderson Cooper for 60 Minutes, Harry explained, “For a long time, I just refused to accept that she was gone. Um, part of, you know, she would never do this to us, but also part of, maybe this is all part of a plan.”
He added that for a while he believed “she would call us and that we would go and join her.”
This followed Harry long into his young adult years. At age 23, he found himself in Paris for the 2007 Rugby World Cup semi-final. While touring the city that first night, he requested his driver to travel through the Pont de l’Alma tunnel at 65 miles per hour, which was reported to be “the exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving,” he writes in Spare, per CNN.
“I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel,” Harry writes. He argues there was “no reason anyone should ever die inside it.” In disbelief, Harry requested that they drive the route again.
Harry writes of the experience: “It had been a very bad idea. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP [Jamie Lowther Pinkerton, Harry and William’s former private secretary] gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.”
“I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead, it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux,” he says in the memoir.
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During his 60 Minutes interview, Harry also shared that he only wept once following his mother’s death. It was as if someone flipped off his crying switch; he didn’t know how to cry. Harry admitted he used to watch old videos of his mom hoping it would trigger tears.
It wasn’t until he worked with a therapist, who had experience using psychedelics as well as Ayahuasca to help with trauma and grief, that Harry finally gained clarity, per a book expert obtained by Daily Mail.
“They [the treatments] cleared away this idea that I had in my head that — that my mother, that I needed to cry to prove to my mother that I missed her. When in fact, all she wanted was for me to be happy,” he explained to Cooper.
Elsewhere in Spare, Harry mentions he sought out a medium in hopes of reconnecting with his mother now as a fully grown adult. Of the things the medium confided in Harry (“you’re living the life she wanted for you…living the life she couldn’t), she recounted a story about his son, Archie, knocking down a Christmas tree ornament. This little anecdote had been a moment only he and wife Meghan Markle had experienced in the privacy of their Montecito home.
“She was there,” Harry writes in reference to Princess Diana.
Spare is officially out now, pick up your copy wherever books are sold!
