“As a 42-year-old man with two kids, a boy and a girl,” Prince Harry says, “you start to look back at your past and your parents as to what you have carried from them, what they’ve handed over to you, what you want to take on and what you don’t.”
If this feels like a startlingly intimate place to start, well: Welcome to this conversation. Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, has recently moved back to the UK from California with his family, but he’s in New York this week, at the end of September, to give a speech during the UN General Assembly. And right now he’s at the GQ offices in One World Trade Center, talking about grief.
Grief is the subject of his new MasterClass, Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss, which the Duke did alongside the scholar Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor. It is also, of course, in some ways the main subject of Prince Harry’s life. He was just 12 years old when his mother, Princess Diana, died tragically, at the age of 36. He has been reckoning with that loss ever since. “Still to this day, people very often come up to me and say, ‘I remember exactly where I was on that day in 1997, 31st of August,’” he says.
In this conversation we talk about his mother, and how he has learned to cope with the impossible. We talk about his grief over certain current relationships within his family, which he says he is working to repair. We talk about having sick fathers, about journalism, about being parents.
“I certainly don’t want any sympathy,” he says. “We’re way past that.”
Why? I ask.
“Why?” He’s incredulous. “Because I’m a prince.”