Prince Harry has adopted a striking new role: master of grief.
It is a decidedly bleak title.
In his latest commercial project, Harry has partnered with MasterClass on an online lesson called Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss.
The promise of resilience may sound surprising coming from a prince who has spent the past six years presenting himself as the injured party.
The financial terms are also notable. Instructors for the online education platform can reportedly receive at least $100,000 upfront, along with a further 30 percent of the subscription revenue generated by an episode.
Harry is joined in the MasterClass by Dr Mary-Frances O’Connor, a specialist in grief.
‘I’d encourage everyone to watch it before casting any judgement,’ a source close to the prince told the Mail.
Naturally, the message urges viewers to watch first. The project is, after all, another opportunity for Harry to turn his personal story into income.
Prince Harry’s latest commercial venture with MasterClass is a tutorial titled Redefining Grief: Building Resilience Through Loss.
The course raises questions about Harry’s claim to offer lessons in resilience after years of public complaints. Meghan was pictured in London this week.
But after everything Harry has already said and written, is there really much left to explain?
Harry remains both aggrieved and grieving. Even so, the source insists that the prince is now ‘speaking from the heart’.
There is also a practical backdrop to the new venture. The lucrative Netflix and Spotify agreements have ended, Harry has never held a conventional job, and Meghan’s efforts to build a content business have failed to make a lasting impact.
So the Sussexes return once again to their familiar territory: loss, disappointment and unresolved sorrow.
‘You would think I had the best help in the world. I’m a prince, for God’s sake,’ Harry says. ‘But I was still grieving and didn’t have any place to put those feelings.’
Yet a question remains: why should audiences seek guidance on grief from a 42-year-old man who, despite having every privilege and resource available to him, says he is still struggling to come to terms with his mother’s death 29 years later?
He is a husband and father of two who wrote in his memoir Spare about using drugs and alcohol to dull his pain.
The memoir also included the bizarre detail that he soothed his frostbitten ‘todger’ with his late mother’s favourite face cream.
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‘My penis,’ Harry wrote, ‘was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized.’
It is difficult to imagine a more fitting description of the audience left listening to this unending stream of intimate emotional disclosure.
It beggars belief that the execs at MasterClass think this is a viable offering. It feels more like an epic troll: Are you struggling with complicated grief? Have you been unable to metabolize the loss of a loved one after a sustained period of time?
Listen to Harry, who also admits here that he ‘slipped into depression’ after Megxit.
‘Being in Canada… within two or three days, I experienced an adrenaline crash, something that I’d never experienced before,’ he says.
‘It was as though I needed stress for my brain to function because I became useless around the house.’
It’s not hard to conjure. After all, what does a prince of the blood, who has never had to forge his own purpose — having been born with one — do once he’s thrown it all away?
Meghan seems to thrive in chaos, unperturbed as she burns down family bridges, moves cities and countries and commercial ventures.
Harry, it seems, just wants stability. The safety he felt in childhood, before Diana died.
If only he had a sense of the sacred versus the profane. If only he understood that the more he speaks about his mother’s death, for money, the more — in my opinion — he cheapens her legacy and his own grief.
It really does seem that this is all Harry has going on for himself: perseverating publicly about his mother’s death, reminding us that he is special because he is her son.
That William also lost his mother doesn’t seem to figure here.
But it makes sense, if we consider Harry’s abject failure in the marketplace of ideas. Recall his reported pitch to Spotify, a podcast in which he would interview such figures as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Mark Zuckerberg about their childhood traumas.
Spotify passed.
And Harry’s inaugural appearance as a paid speaker at a corporate event, his first after Megxit, was at JP Morgan’s Alternative Investment Summit in Miami, for which he was estimated to have fetched up to $1 million.
That speech? It was about his late mother and his grief.
One million dollars for that. Imagine.
People with a lot less money and resources have suffered as much, if not more. It’s well past time for Harry to grow up.