Never in his life has Prince Harry felt as close to mom, the late Princess Diana, as he does today. At the tender age of 12, the Duke of Sussex lost his mom in a fatal car collision in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris.
Diana was 36 years old when she was chased to her death — the same age Prince Harry was when he removed himself from the British monarchy and sought refuge in Canada before eventually settling down in California. The timeline of their respective lives is enough to send chills down anyone’s spine.
“I’ve said quite a lot recently in different interviews that I’ve really felt the presence of my mom, especially in the last couple of years,” Harry revealed on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “And I detail in the book my brother and I talking at her grave and how he felt as though she had been with him for a long period of time and helped set him up with life and that he felt she was now moving over to me.”
“And I have felt her more in the last two years than I have in the last 30,” the Duke added.
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Both host Stephen Colbert and Harry went on to make the correlation that the timing of Harry and wife Meghan Markle’s exit from the royal family is rather uncanny when compared to the timeline of his mom’s toxic relationship with the UK press as a royal.
“Well, she died at 36, and I was 36 when this all kicked off,” Harry noted. “This” being Harry and Meghan’s disentanglement from the institution and by extension, Harry’s immediate family including King Charles, Queen Consort Camilla, Prince William, and Kate Middleton.
He added: “January of 2020 was when my wife and I basically said, ‘Enough, we can’t cope. We can’t deal with this. We need to carve out something different.’ So that was an interesting overlap of time.”
In 2020, Harry and Meghan fled from Buckingham Palace and temporarily relocated to Canada. However, after being found and bombarded by the UK press, they secretly escaped to LA, where Meghan’s good friend Tyler Perry arranged for them to live at his estate with full security. The pair along with son Archie lived there throughout the pandemic before putting down roots in Montecito.
Of the many shocking bombshells revealed in Spare, the Duke recounts several quarrels he and William got into over the years. If his mom were alive, Harry admitted to Colbert that it’s possible to envision a life in which he and his brother are still as thick as thieves.
“If your mother were still alive, do you ever think about how she might handle this moment?” Colbert asked Harry of his and William’s estrangement.
“We wouldn’t have got to this moment,” Harry quipped. “It’s impossible to say where we would be now — where those relationships would be now — but there is no way that the distance between my brother and I would be the same.”
Harry’s memoir, Spare, is now available wherever books are sold.
