Prince Harry has revealed he speaks to a portrait of his late mother, Princess Diana, and always asks her the same question.
The Duke of Sussex, 42, made the disclosure in a new MasterClass session about grief alongside neuroscientist Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor. The portrait he keeps was taken by French photographer Patrick Demarchelier and published in a Harper’s Bazaar December 1995 special issue.
“I can actually get eye contact from her, and there’s a cheekiness in her smile… I just feel very connected to her,” Harry shared in the session.
“I find myself looking at her and wondering, ‘What is she thinking about what I am doing right now?'” he added.
The “Spare” author admitted he sometimes studies the picture “to see if the facial expression changes, but it never does.” Harry was 12 when Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997; she was 36.
Harry recalled struggling to look at photos of Diana in the immediate aftermath of her death. “Even though I had photographs in my bedroom at school, I distinctly remember not thinking about my mother because thinking about something that sad was never gonna bring her back,” he explained.
He described feeling “emotionally numb” for years, to the point where he “felt disloyal and guilty” over the possibility of being happy again. “I felt like I had to be sad and I had to be emotionally numb in order to prove to her that I missed her,” he shared.
That mindset eventually shifted. Harry said he realized Diana 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.
Harry now thinks about Diana “pretty much every night and most mornings,” and asks for her help during difficult periods. He described moments over the last six years where her presence felt unmistakable.
“A lot has happened in my life in the last six years, and she has turned up at moments where it makes complete sense that she turned up in those moments,” he explained. “It just makes me laugh out loud sometimes because it’s like, this is not a coincidence. There is no version of where this is anything else but you.”
Harry added, “I feel it as an energy. And also it’s visual. It’s a sign. And it’s very much connected to her.”
Joining the military at age 20 became what Harry called the “perfect distraction” from grieving. For roughly two decades, his automatic response to being asked if he was OK was simply “I’m fine.” He now recognizes that period as “numbness, emotional shutdown,” with adrenaline pushing him forward without his awareness.
Harry clarified that his post-traumatic stress was not tied to his military tour in Afghanistan. Instead, that experience “appeared to be a trigger for other traumas that had stored themselves within me.”
While promoting his memoir “Spare” in 2023, Harry told “Good Morning America” co-host Michael Strahan that Diana would be “sad” about his falling out with his brother, Prince William. “I think she’d be looking at it long term to know that there are certain things that we need to go through to be able to heal the relationship,” he said.
He also noted at that time that he had “felt the presence of my mum more so in the last two years than I have in the last 30.”
Harry recently moved back to the UK with his wife, Meghan Markle, and their two children, a relocation that has drawn fresh attention to the couple’s ongoing tensions with the royal family.
The MasterClass grief session featuring Harry and Dr. O’Connor is available for streaming now.