Prince Harry, 29 Years Later, on His Last Call With Diana: a Twelve-Year-Old Boy in a Hurry to Hang Up and Play With His Cousins

Harry is 42, and the biggest regret of his life is a conversation that lasted a few minutes. The end of August 1997, Balmoral, a phone call. On the other end is Diana, a few hours before the crash in Paris. He is a twelve-year-old boy who wants to hang up as fast as possible.

"If I'd known it was the last one, the conversation would have been completely different," the prince says in an interview with GQ magazine, given during his recent stay in New York. And he adds, without embellishment: "I was a twelve-year-old kid who was only thinking about hanging up and going to play with my cousins."

In the interview Harry draws the distinction anyone who has lost someone close knows: illness leaves time to say goodbye, a sudden loss leaves nothing. The subject isn't abstract for him - his father, King Charles III, has recently been dealing with cancer.

In his memoir "Spare," published in January 2023, Balmoral in the summer of 1997 is described as an idyll. "For me, Balmoral never stopped being, simply, Paradise," he wrote then. It was at Balmoral that he heard his mother's voice for the last time, and the next morning he learned she was gone.

Today Harry turns grief into work. He is preparing a MasterClass course on grief and resilience, together with neuroscientist Mary-Frances O'Connor. For decades the royal household turned grief into protocol, and the prince who left it is turning it into a lecture. But the pain of the boy who in September 1997 walked behind his mother's coffin through London was real, in front of the whole world.

The most intimate part of the interview is also the shortest. Harry says he still talks to his mother in his thoughts, asks her questions and sometimes feels he gets an answer. "I wonder what my family would be like if she were still here," he says.

William was 15 at the time. Today the brothers are far from reconciled, and Harry's question hangs in the air just as it did 29 years ago: would this family look different with Diana in it?