By Elayne Savage, PhD
Diana and her boys, taken by John Swannell Christmas Card portrait
When you are 12 years old and your mother is killed in a crash, your world crumbles. Everything turns upside down and inside out. Devastating doesn’t even begin to describe the shock of it. There are no words.
Since the day Harry’s mother was killed in a car crash I’ve felt a kindred-spirited-ness with him. I, too, was 12 years old when my mother was killed decades earlier – also in late August – in a DC-3 that crashed into a cornfield in Iowa. My grandmother died too. Poof they were gone.
Two days after Princess Diana’s death I was launching my first book in the SF Bay Area. I was imagining my mother there with me, feeling proud of me.
I knew I had to begin my talk by confiding my immense feelings of sadness for Harry and William. Especially about how I found myself caught up in the experience of 12 year old Harry. How could I not describe my own pain and my years-long struggle to deal with the shock of the unexpected deaths in my life?
The crash was something I didn’t much talk about. All through college hardly any one knew how my mother died. I always felt different from the other kids. Even defective. It seemed everyone else had a mother.
Shutting Down Emotions
I simply shut down my emotions in much the same way Harry recently described, “My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum because why would that help? It’s only going to make you sad. It’s not going to bring her back.”
I don’t know what the rules about grieving were in Harry and William’s family, but in mine the unspoken rule was “there is to be no grieving.” For years after the plane crash we were not allowed to talk about my mom. My younger brother Lee and I were expected to hold it all in.
My father even removed all of her photos and we thought he threw them away. Then 30 years later when he died, Lee found albums stashed on the top shelf of Dad’s closet. He had moved with them four times.
So that evening of my book talk, walking from my car to the bookstore I was consumed with thoughts of how 12 year old Harry and 12 year old me both lost our mothers in crashes. I knew I had to share this in my book talk. How could I not?
When I arrived and saw the size of the crowd, what seemed like a scary plan began to feel daunting.
This would be the first time I allowed myself to be vocally public about my decades of grief. And there were so many people in that room!
And after all the years of secrecy, telling my story that evening was a breakthrough. It freed me up to be more comfortable describing my feelings both in my writing and in my workshops. Sometimes, on stage as I remember what it was like to be that 12 year old, I find myself crying.
Our Last Words to Our Mothers
Harry and William so poignantly describe their last phone call with their mother hours before her death. Harry relates “…regretting for the rest of my life how short the phone call was ….I have to deal with that for the rest of my life: not knowing that it was the last time I'd speak to my mum, how differently that conversation would have panned out if I'd had even the slightest inkling that her life was going to be taken that night."
I too would have a very different conversation with my mother before she and my grandmother left for the airport. I, too, have a story to tell about regretting my last words to my mother.
I had just returned from summer camp, my first time away, and was upset she was leaving me to escort my grandmother to the Mayo clinic.
Instead of hugging her and saying, "Please don’t go, I need you,” I screamed at her, “I hate you—I wish you were dead.”
And I never saw her again.
In my 12 year old mind, I believed my words had caused the plane to crash. This belief continued, of course, for many years.
I wonder if 12 year old Harry told himself that having a different sort of conversation might have prevented the car crash.
And what about you? Have you ever wished you could roll back the film and said something else or something more?
This kind of unresolved complicated grief takes so much energy to deal with.
Harry says it very well, “…losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well.”
This kind of loss is often accompanied by feeling very alone and isolated. It kindles a tremendous fear of losing the people we love, a fear often wrapped in the most profound rejection of all – abandonment.
This kind of unresolved complicated grief and the resulting fears color our relationships in profound ways, influencing how we interact with others and how they interact with us. Often it even affects the lives of our children and grandchildren. Too often we begin to create distance from those we love, including our children, afraid to care too much for fear of losing them.
For many of us healing is a life-long process, including a need to be often checking to make sure loved ones are still by our side. That they aren’t going anywhere.
And many of us do a kind of strange thing. We have ways of giving out confusing messages to our partners such as “come closer, go away“ or “I’m going to leave you before you can leave me.”
Stand By Me – For Always
I loved that the couple chose ’Stand By Me’ as their wedding song. As I was watching the video of the choir singing, the camera focused briefly on the couple holding hands and listening intently. I think I saw a momentary 12 year old look on Prince Harry’s face as he searched the face of his bride, almost as if for reassurance.
screen capture/Royal Wedding performance – Karen Gibson and the Kingdom Choir
And then, when Meghan Markle looked up and smiled at him his whole face changed!
screen capture/Royal Wedding performance – Karen Gibson and the Kingdom Choir
Maybe I was actually seeing my own 12 year old self and imagining my own need for reassurance in the first photo.
What do you think?
© Elayne Savage, PhD
More on unresolved and complicated grief: bit.ly/SYkMJv
Harry’s interview: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/16/prince-harry-sought-counselling-death-mother-led-two-years-total/
Until next month . . .
Elayne
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Elayne Savage is the author of ground-breaking relationship books published in 9 languages.
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