I feel really sorry for William

[ssd]

I'm not usually a fan , but I've been thinking about William. He must be absolutely reeling. His dad and his wife both have cancer. He doesn't talk to his brother and his mum died when he was young. I can't imagine the turmoil he is in, i hope he has good friends around him.

No matter your age or background a cancer diagnosis is shocking.

I too feel for William - especially with the awful SM comments in recent weeks.

I'm not keen on William but I do really feel for him. His dad and wife are ill at the same time and he must be worrying about his children losing their mum young just like he did. It's an awful position to be in.

I'm so sorry cancer is the most cruel illness and we all fear it, don't we?

It's not that simple. Cancer is incredibly unpredictable. One of the paradoxes is that the treatment can make it come back. But to live you have to have the treatments, so.... Also, sometimes cancer in younger people can be more aggressive because their cells are younger

Honestly, how he hasn't broken down is beyond me.

The more I read about William, the more I ask myself that same question.

He clearly had to grow up pretty fast.
Starting the age of 10 when his parents separated, William became Diana's confident. She called him her soulmate, leaned on him for emotional support. From what I've read, he became more of a companion and a friend than a son. She would confide in him about her life, her divorce and would ask him for advice (at 10 years old!)

She would also confide in him about her other relationships with Dodi, Hasnat,... He apparently had a photo of Diana's lover's wife on his dartboard at Eton when he was 13. Who knows what his mum told him?

Then, after all of this, his mother died
Not only does he has to deal with his grief but he has to deal with his father using him as PR to rehabilitate Camilla's image.

Months after Diana died, an article was released in The Sun about a Camilla and William meeting for the first time. The article was so detailed that only a person who was actually there could've known all of this.
I doubt 16 year old William went to press to tell them about his meeting with Camilla.

A lot of people call William and Catherine boring but I think "boring" is exactly what he needed. He needed a strong family unit and stability and that's probably what he found in his wife.

@Nono22972
The theory that it was Camilla leaking about that meeting has been debunked - her private secretary told her husband about it and it made its way into the papers via a colleague of his. The secretary resigned / was sacked for it. Easy to find if you google. It was reported at the time in 1998 and again when Harry tried to blame Camilla for it in Spare.

I always think about Diana making public that she threw herself down the stairs whilst pregnant with him (if indeed it did come from her, it was in the Morton book anyway).

Imagine growing up knowing that?

It’s always made me somewhat sympathetic to him.

I can’t say I’m a huge royalist really, I like the frocks and stuff but as an institution I just don’t think it makes sense anymore. Still, I feel very sorry for him on a human level. I also lost a parent (both my birth parents actually) whilst still a child, then my adoptive parents whilst still a relatively young adult and it has absolutely made me very fearful about anything happening to myself or DH whilst DD is still young. I grew up in the shadow of bereavement and illness including cancer treatment and it’s the absolute last thing I’d ever want for DD. I also have a sibling and a very good friend with a preschooler DD, both undergoing cancer treatment at the moment, it’s bloody grim. So yes, I’m sympathetic to someone I ‘don’t even know’ but also probably relating it my own experiences and those of loved ones, which is making it hit home a bit harder.

Aside from all that, it is interesting to see how William’s popularity has seemingly dipped (or maybe that’s just the impression I get from social media - could well be untrue!) I know someone who came into contact with him regularly through work when he was doing air ambulance, and they only have very positive things to say so I suppose that’s coloured my view to be a more favourable one. I wonder if he’d have kept his hair and his Diana-esque looks he maybe wouldn’t have attracted quite the same vitriol?

Oh ok! My bad! I haven't seen the debunked version

Easy to rewrite history when the other woman is dead.
I see this thread has turned again into lets trash Diana.

So sorry about your sister Myrtle!

Anything Catherine and William tell us /the media about her illness and its prognosis, they are automatically telling their children (because the news will get into school). They know this well.

How much would you want your children to know in this situation? What would you stress and what keep quiet about.

I hope they are able to support each other and can avoid feeling any pressure to update us!

@OriginalStarWars Diana, like all of us was a complex individual. She was, I believe, damaged by many many people during her life, she was also adored by many people during her life. She did amazing things for many causes and also some horrible acts that hurt others deeply.

That complexity, augmented by the nature of her death is rooted in her children (and probably Charles and others close to her) I don't think this thread is trashing her but acknowledging that the positives she gave her children (thinking of others through visits to homeless shelters as just one example) is inevitably balanced to a greater or lesser degree by the negative exposures she gave them. Her children appear to share similar 'blends' of her - both H&M and W&K have spoken about talking to their children about issues around homelessness for example, both H&W have justified but possibly heightened distrust of many forms of media, both H&W speak about the value of good mental health support and probably feel a sense of anxiety about their ability to be 'in control' given the public roles they have/had.

This, of course, isn't limited to Diana - we could have a similar conversation about the impact of bullying/isolation Charles felt as he was packed off to school in Scotland.

As Larkin said - a human experience...

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They may not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one anothers throats

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself

Except of course, we all hope we can do the work to not fuck up the next lot coming up after us.

PS - thank you for the messages about my sister - it was a few years ago now - however, sometimes things hit differently don't they.

Anything Catherine and William tell us /the media about her illness and its prognosis, they are automatically telling their children (because the news will get into school). They know this well.

I agree with this. If things do look worrying, or begin to look worrying, I'm sure they won't be saying anything publicly that they haven't already explained to the children. And god knows in that situation you want to shield your children from worry for as long as possible. So she will be "doing well" and hopefully the conspiracy theorists will keep their mouths shut and let them announce things as and when it suits their family.

I'm so sorry you went through all of this.

As for William, I don't think he's unpopular but I think the H&M saga and all the rumours about him did affect his popularity a little bit

Easy to rewrite history when the other woman is dead.
I see this thread has turned again into lets trash Diana.

I'm not trashing her. No one is perfect. We all have flaws. She married Charles at 19 (20?) and spent more than a decade in a loveless marriage. That would affect anyone's mental heath.

But that doesn't change the fact that Diana had some issues. She probably felt very lonely and couldn't trust a lot of people therefore she leaned on William.

I've been saying that both Charles and Diana made mistakes: Charles with his infidelity and Diana who clearly parentified William

Don't be mad at me, blame the people who were close to her who have talked to the press over the years

I've been feeling awful for William all day. Then i seen a news report about a young boy from Gaza being treated in a hospital far from his father. The rest of his family had been killed and he was in agony and crying for his dad. It was really awful.
The world is a horrible place sometimes.

I watched that, it's horrifying

@AliasGrape you post a long post with some extremely interesting points then you finish with a " maybe if William had kept his hair and his statuesque looks" people would like him better or similar . You cannot be serious throwing that into the mix at the end of? What the heck? It completely negates the previous bit of your post!

Don't beat yourself up. We can feel bad for many people and causes all at the same time. 🥲

There's no re writing of history and no one is trashing her....

I’m perfectly serious - I think it’s interesting how William went from enormously popular, was seen almost as the embodiment of his mother, people calling for Charles to be skipped over entirely in the line of succession in favour of William (which of course would never have happened but I’m old enough to remember a time when there was lots of talk about it), to being regularly called lazy, work shy, sulky, bad-tempered, racist, an adulterer etc. He was the golden boy at one point and now - at least for a large section of social media - he’s cast as the villain.

As @Nono22972 pointed out, I don’t think the fall out from Harry and Meghan’s exit and subsequent revelations/ allegations have done any favours there. I have noticed a strong tendency amongst their supporters (again mainly talking about social media here) to align Harry with Diana and William with Charles - again as posters on here have already said, there’s a tendency to forget that William lost his mum at a young age too. In fact I even saw people suggesting something untoward may have happened to Kate because ‘look what they did to Diana’ with the suggestion that William is somehow part of that ‘they’.

So yes, I wonder if William still had that strong, visible resemblance and therefore connection to Diana he might come across more sympathetic to those sections of the public/ media who currently view him so negatively. Maybe not, I might be talking out of my behind and it would have played out exactly the same either way - I just saw a meme today saying something along the lines of ‘for the gen z-ers out there who won’t remember this, I have to inform you that William used to be the hot one’ and it made me think.

I’m not saying that it would be right if that were the case! And I have no idea if he’s actually a lovely person or if he’s all the terrible things he’s been accused of or, what’s most likely somewhere in between.

Quite.

I appreciate some are sharing anecdotes of loved they know who have been diagnosed with cancer, but it's all moot. When I was diagnosed, I was told that everyone else's cancer, particularly their treatment (and prognosis) is irrelevant. And it's true, it is. Other's treatment has zero bearing on my cancer, the PoW's cancer, or anyone else's. Cancer, its treatment, and how one's body will react is unique to the individual.

Like PoW, I am having preventative chemo, well, had, have just finished six months of it. Chemo is given because there's a very real chance of another primary cancer or a secondary cancer. Yes, surgery is nearly always the first line of attack, but if it's a grade 3 cancer, no matter how small, then there's a very real probability the cancer will return at some point. This might be because it has shed cells, that dormant cells will wake up elsewhere in the body, or the original cancer returns.

Chemo is horrible to go through. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Chemo isn't given to those who don't need it. In truth, there is no such thing as preventative chemo. Chemo is chemo is chemo.

Anyway, back on topic. I really feel for William. Having lost my mother at a similar age (and a year before he lost his), I know how this will be weighing on his mind and his fears for his children. To have both your wife and father ill with cancer is dreadful, even more so when the eye's of the world are on you.

@doublec I hope you are doing okay

Yes you can’t take a day off sick if you’re feeling utterly overwhelmed either. He has to smile and shake hands and show interest in others no matter what. However vile the stuff that’s being said about him is, he can’t let it show.

He did take time off and at short notice said he could not attend the memorial where he was going to do a reading. So it is false to say he can not take a day off sick, he can and does.

That wasn’t a “work”event, though tbf. It was a private memorial service

Yes, totally agree. He had a traumatic childhood and has lately lost the most stable people in his life (grandparents died, brother estranged). Now to have both his father and wife diagnosed with cancer at once must be such a shock. You can't help but think he could be succeeding as King soon too. Poor thing.