In a recent video Prince Harry is seen comforting a mother as she describes the moment she had to tell her son his father had been killed in Afghanistan.
Prince Harry has public opinion divided since he stepped down from senior royal duties in January 2020. Since then, he has been building his life with his wife Meghan Markle and their children. Harry and Meghan have used their publicity to push many causes that they support, Markle even assisting the Duke in becoming a feminist icon in his own right. The Prince is no stranger to heartbreak, losing his mother at the tender age of 12, and more recently losing his paternal grandparents, the late Queen, and Prince Philip. It’s not surprising that a charity that lies close to Harry’s heart supports young people in dealing with the grief and loss of a parent.
Prince Harry comforts a mother who is ‘shattering her son’s world’
Nikki Scott is the founder of organization Scotty’s Little Soldiers that currently supports 680 bereaved children who have lost a parent serving in the British Armed Forces. The organization estimates that, 2100 children are newly bereaved of a serving parent each year.
In July 2009 Nikki was informed her husband Corporal Lee Scott has passed during his service with the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment. The difficult sharing of this information with her then five-year-old son inspired her to set up this charity. The Duke of Sussex is the global ambassador for the group, and he surprised the children at a Scotty’s event in May.
In a heartbreaking conversation, covered by Sky News, Nikki opens up to the Prince about the moment she had to tell her five-year-old son, Kai, about their shared loss. “It was the worst. How do you tell a five-year-old this?” She asks.
“I took him up and sat him on the bed and I said, ‘Kai, do you remember where Daddy was?’ and he said, ‘yeah, Afghan’, and I said, ‘something really bad has happened and the baddies (because he used to play army) have hurt dad and he’s died’.”
Nikki then bursts into tears, comforted by the Duke of Sussex, as she described the pain of “shattering her son’s world”.
Fans are moved by this tender moment the Prince Harry shared with the war widow, with one user commenting, “He really does have a heart for the people. Love the work he does with Scotty’s Little Soldiers and the light he shines on the organization.”
Prince Harry shares his own experience of dealing with grief
At the age of 12 Harry also experienced the loss of a parent when his mother Princess Diana was killed in a road accident in a tunnel in Paris. In Harry’s memoir, Spare, he shares the time he visited the tunnel in which she died.
Harry explains to Nikki the complexity he feels when dealing with grief and his sense of loss, he shares, “You convince yourself that the person you’ve lost wants you, or you need to be sad for as long as possible to prove to them that they are missed.”
“But then there’s this realization of, no, they must want me to be happy.” The Prince continues.
Between his autobiography and a series of recent interviews, the 39-year-old has been very candid about his own mental health. As an advocate for the importance of bringing mental health into the discussion, he says about the Scotty’s kids, “That’s the hardest thing, especially for kids, I think, which is, ‘I don’t want to talk about it because it will make me sad, but once realizing if I do talk about it, and I’m celebrating their life, then actually, things become easier’.”
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