Prince Harry was 23 when he decided to drive through the tunnel in Paris that claimed his mother’s life. Here’s how he felt.

Ten years after Princess Diana’s untimely death, Prince Harry decided to drive through the same tunnel that claimed her life.

Prince Harry, who was 23 years old at the time, travelled through the same tunnel where his mother, Princess Diana, had died 10 years earlier. It was during the Rugby World Cup semi-final in Paris in 2007. Harry describes the severe suffering he experienced in his quest for closure in his new memoir, which was released on January 10.

When Harry asked his driver if he knew Pont de l’Alma, where his mother had succumbed to death, the driver seemed a bit perplexed. When the driver said he knew it, Lady Di’s younger son said he wanted to “go through” the tunnel, that too at 65 miles per hour to be precise. It was the exact speed Diana’s car “had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported”, PEOPLE quoted Harry’s memoir as stating.

The driver was ready to drive through the tunnel, which from 1982 to 1997 was recognised as an accident black spot due to 11 fatalities there. He was cautioned that if he ever exposed this to anyone else, there would be dire consequences. The driver gave his OK.

They passed the Ritz, where Princess of Wales and her boyfriend had their final meal “that August night”. They then made their way to the tunnel’s entrance. They sped ahead and passed over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance—the alleged bump that caused Diana’s Mercedes to deviate from its intended path. “But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it,” Prince Harry writes.

Harry leaned forward as the car entered the tunnel, watched the light shift to a sort of water orange and watched the concrete pillars flash by. They quickly appeared from the opposite side as Harry stayed anxious. He always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. “No reason anyone should ever die inside it,” Harry writes.

The same process was repeated. They drove through the infamous tunnel, and Harry thought it was a “very bad idea”. He calls the idea of driving through the tunnel “uniquely ill-conceived”. While he thought he wanted closure for his mother’s accidental death, he didn’t really want it. Now that he’d driven through it, there was no disbelief left in his mind. “She’s dead, I thought. My God, she’s really gone for good,” Harry adds while he did get the closure he “was pretending to seek”.