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Prince Harry revealed he regrets how he handled his final phone call with his mom, Princess Diana, before her tragic death.
“I had a mom taken away from me too soon. I have spoken openly about one of my biggest regrets is that last phone call I had with her,” he told GQ in an interview published Tuesday.
“If I had known it was the last call with her, how different that conversation would be,” Harry continued. “And I’m the one that has to live with that.”
Harry, who was 12 when Diana died in 1997 at age 36, said that at the time of the tragedy “all I wanted to do was run and play with my cousins.”
However, the “Spare” author explained that he was able to rid himself of the “heavy guilt” he felt about his mother once he “became a parent.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Harry explained that he had a harder time dealing with Diana’s death in the public eye.
“I mean, 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 recalled.
“And when you’re surrounded by people and different generations, where they can remember exactly where they were when that happened, and then they look at me and/or my brother and go, ‘Wow, you guys were teenagers, not even, and this happened to you on such a public scale, where do you go from that?'”
Harry said that now “the least” he can do is help other people navigate grief and “give some encouragement to people that when you are rock bottom and when you’re finding things really, really hard, that you can come back from that.”
Harry spoke more about his late mother in a recent MasterClass session about grief, revealing he often looks at an old portrait of Diana and asks himself what she’d think of his life today.
“I can actually get eye contact from her, and there’s a cheekiness in her smile… I just feel very connected to her,” he shared.
Harry also admitted he felt “emotionally numb” for years after Diana died, to the point where he “felt disloyal and guilty” over the possibility of being happy again.
But the father of two said he eventually realized that his mom would want him to be happy, which was “a huge mental shift” for him.
“It freed me, and it gave me a whole different outlook on life,” he stated.
After six years of living in California, Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, recently moved back to the UK with their two children, Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5, despite his estrangement from his father, King Charles III, and his brother, Prince William.
In the GQ interview, Harry explained that he moved back so the kids could attend a British school, and also to be “closer” to his family.
“It’s nice to be back,” he said.