It is one of the defining images of grief in Britain: two boys, too young to be in black suits, following their mother, coffin of their motherpublished on Wednesday, Prince Harry, who was 12 when his mother died, has now opened up about how corrosive that very British stoicism in the face of grief can be as a young person: “You can’t suppress it for ever,” he said. “It’s not sustainable.”
That isolation can lead to bottling up your emotions – but this, in turn, often leads to self-destructive behaviour down the line as the pain catches up with you. Grief needs to be expressed, or, in Prince Harry’s words, “it will eat away at you inside”. The Royal Family has historically set the tone for how our nation grieves: Queen Victoria famously engendered strict mourning rituals, influenced by her life-long grieving for Prince Albert; and while this is not a call to bring back black dresses and time tariffs for grieving, it does show how the Royals can impact society’s attitude to grief at large: it is within their gift to convey the message that grieving is not only not taboo, but that it is human and it is normal.