Prince Harry has opened up about the phone call he now counts as his deepest regret.
The Duke of Sussex, 40, told GQ in an interview published Tuesday that his final conversation with Princess Diana haunts him still. Harry was 12 when Diana died in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, at age 36.
“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 said in the interview.
“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.”
The “Spare” author recalled that at the time of the tragedy, his childish impulse was to escape the weight of it entirely. “All I wanted to do was run and play with my cousins,” he said.
For years afterward, Harry carried what he described as “heavy guilt” about his mother. He explained in the GQ interview that this burden only lifted once he became a parent himself to Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5.
The public nature of Diana’s death compounded his struggle. Harry noted that strangers still approach him to share their own memories of that day.
“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.
Those encounters underscore the impossible scale of his loss. “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 has since channeled that experience into advocacy. He told GQ that “the least” he can do now is help others 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.”
His reflections on Diana extend beyond the interview. In a recent MasterClass session about grief, Harry revealed he keeps an old portrait of his mother and often studies it for guidance.
“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.
The Duke also admitted he spent years “emotionally numb” after Diana died, to the point where he “felt disloyal and guilty” at the prospect of happiness. A breakthrough came when he recognized his mother would want him to find joy.
“It freed me, and it gave me a whole different outlook on life,” he stated.
Harry’s personal evolution has unfolded alongside major life changes. After six years in California, he and Meghan Markle recently relocated to the United Kingdom with their children. He told GQ the move was partly so Archie and Lilibet could attend British school, and partly to be “closer” to his family despite ongoing estrangement from King Charles III and Prince William.