Prince Harry has candidly admitted that he used to watch videos of his late mother Princess Diana and ‘muster up memories of her’ in an attempt to cry over her death.
The 38-year-old made the emotional admission during an explosive interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes in which he revealed his ‘guilt’ at not being able to shed a tear about Diana’s tragic passing in 1997.
‘There was this weight on my chest that I felt for so many years that I was never able to cry,’ he told host Anderson Cooper, according to a transcript of the interview that DailyMail.com received ahead of the pre-taped interview’s release.
‘So I was constantly trying to find a way to cry, but… in even sitting on my sofa and going over as many memories as I could muster up about my mum. And sometimes I watched videos online.’
However, Harry says that, no matter how hard he tried, he ‘couldn’t’ shed a tear – something that filled him with ‘guilt’ for years.
Prince Harry has revealed that he used to think about ‘memories’ of his mother and watch videos of her in an attempt to cry about her death
Harry, 38, seen with Diana in 1987, revealed in his book Spare that he was only able to cry about his mother once – and he admitted in his 60 Minutes interview that this caused him huge guilt
That guilt is something that the Duke struggled with from the moment that he and his brother William greeted members of the public who had turned out to pay their respects to Diana on the day of her funeral, with Harry explaining that he was stunned at how many people were sobbing over his mother’s death.
‘I remember the guilt that I felt,’ he said of that moment, adding: ‘The fact that the people that we were meeting were showing more emotion than [William and I] were showing, maybe more emotion than we even felt.
‘There was a lotta tears. I talk about how wet people’s hands were. And I couldn’t understand it at first.
‘Their hands were wet from wiping their own tears away. I do remember one of the strangest parts to it was taking flowers from people and then placing those flowers with the rest of them. As if I was some sort of middle person for their grief. And that really stood out for me.’
Harry struggled with his grief for years – and says it wasn’t until he began going through therapy and experimenting with psychedelic drugs that he truly came to terms with his mother’s death.
The Duke of Sussex told Cooper that psychedelics like ayahuasca and magic mushrooms his ‘medicine’ after the huge ‘loss’ of his mother in 1997, saying that using psychedelics when he got older ultimately ‘cleared away the idea’ that he needed be sad to prove he ‘missed’ his mom.
‘I would never recommend people to do this recreationally,’ he said during the one-hour tell-all interview.
Harry says that, no matter how hard he tried, he ‘couldn’t’ shed a tear – something that filled him with ‘guilt’ for years
Harry (pictured at Diana’s funeral) says he has only ever cried about his mother’s death once – at her burial
‘But doing it with the right people if you are suffering from a huge amount of loss, grief or trauma, then these things have a way of working as a medicine.
‘For me, they cleared the windscreen, the windshield, the misery of loss. They cleared away this idea that I had in my head 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.’
Harry explained during the sit down that he believes he didn’t cry over Diana’s death because he had ‘refused to accept that she was gone.’
Tonight’s interview with 60 Minutes aired just over an hour after another TV sit-down between Harry and British journalist Tom Bradby premiered in the UK.
In that interview, the Duke also spoke out about his struggle to show emotion about his mother’s death, telling Bradby: ‘Everyone thought and felt like they knew our mum, and the two closest people to her, the two most loved people by her, were unable to show any emotion in that moment.
‘Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing the night my mother died.’
Harry also says that he cried once in the wake of his mother’s death – at her burial.
‘I cried once, at the burial, and you know I go into detail about how strange it was and how actually there was some guilt that I felt, and I think William felt as well, by walking around the outside of Kensington Palace.’
