A single short sentence was all Prince Harry offered on his father’s cancer, and then the conversation turned to orphans.
Harry, the Duke of Sussex, 42, gave that update in an interview with GQ magazine’s Zach Baron that the magazine published online Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026 — the same day the royal family welcomed the Sultan of Oman to Windsor Castle for a state visit. The two men sat down during Harry’s visit to New York City in late September.
A Single Short Sentence About Cancer
Baron put a premise to Harry: that the traumatic death of a parent could make having a sick parent now triggering. “Yeah, but he’s getting better,” Harry replied.
Doctors diagnosed King Charles III with cancer in 2024, and he is still undergoing treatment. Harry is not believed to have seen his father in person since moving back to Britain in August.
The talk moved from the king to the people Harry meets who have buried both parents. “I think there’s a big difference between losing one parent and losing two,” he said. “The friends of mine that have lost two, they go, ‘Well, now I’m an orphan,’ even if you’re in your 40s or 50s. I’ve never heard someone say that to me before.”
Scars That Stick Around Forever
Six years ago the couple gave up their roles as working royals and moved to California. Harry has now returned to the U.K. with his wife, Meghan Markle, and their two children. The couple used past interviews to accuse an unspecified royal of racism and to say palace staff were insensitive to Meghan’s mental health.
Harry said yes when Baron asked whether he grieves the complicated relationship with his father and his older brother, Prince William. Broken relationships — between siblings, and between children and parents — come up constantly with the people he meets, he said, and that is part of why the public watches his family so closely.
Harry said scars “stick around forever” when asked whether the rift could be repaired. Letting go of the past is “something that I would encourage everybody to do,” he added, and family disputes are not worth carrying on when the world already supplies enough drama.
“Some people don’t want it to work out — I want it to work out,” he said. A spokesperson for the Sussexes later clarified the remarks were not a swipe at William; the spokesperson said they were made in a general context and were not directed at any member of the royal family.
The Last Phone Call With Diana
A car crash in Paris killed Princess Diana in 1997, when Harry was 12. He walked behind her coffin at the funeral alongside William, Charles, Prince Philip and Diana’s younger brother, Earl Spencer, who set down his disapproval of that decision in “Swan Song,” his memoir about Diana.
Harry told Baron his biggest regret about his mother is the last phone call between them, and that he is the one who has to live with how that conversation went. All he wanted as a boy of 12 was to get back to his cousins and play, he said.
Guilt stuck to him before he had children, and it felt heavy, Harry said. Fatherhood shifted the weight of it. His children are Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, five.
Harry said he wants no sympathy, because he is a prince with a support network. He has tried different forms of therapy and put in the work, he said, and the alternative is something he still wonders about. Other people, he hoped, would find his talk of grief and trauma useful.
Putting Archie and Lilibet into British schools turned out to matter more to him than he had expected, he said. They were loving it two weeks in.
A Joke at Peterhead Port
The most recent update on the king’s health came in December 2025, when Charles said his cancer had been reduced. The Princess of Wales, whose diagnosis came weeks apart from Charles in 2024, is now in remission.
Charles visited Peterhead Port in Aberdeenshire in September, where a joke of his drew a laugh from his audience: he said he did not know whether he would still be alive by the time the area’s latest projects were finished. A member of the public the same age as the king told him at the Sandringham Flower Show in July that he was looking good. “It gets much harder, doesn’t it?” Charles replied, in good humor.
