His autobiography is also about Harry’s beloved Mama Diana, who died in 1997 at the age of 36. How much the tragic loss still burdens the prince is now becoming clear again. In his book, he recounts a heartbreaking moment when he decided to race through his mother’s death tunnel in Paris.
Harry was visiting the French capital in 2007 for the Rugby World Cup. In his memoirs he reports that he asked his driver to take him to the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. “We drove off, weaving through traffic and passing the Ritz (hotel) where Mummy had her last meal with her boyfriend that August night,” the prince writes in the book, according to People magazine.
He then raced through the tunnel at around 100 kilometers per hour – the same speed that had cost his mother her life ten years earlier. The prince was surprised at how “normal” the tunnel was. “I leaned back. I said softly, ‘Is that all? There is nothing. Just a straight tunnel’. I had always imagined the tunnel as a treacherous passage.” And further: “There is no reason why anyone should ever die in it.”
He drove through the tunnel hoping to finally be able to process the death of his beloved mummy. But that didn’t happen – on the contrary: “Instead, it brought me back to the beginning of the pain,” says Harry.