Meghan, Duchess Of Sussex, is opening up about a deeply personal loss.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Meghan Markle revealed that she suffered a miscarriage in July.
She and hubby Prince Harry are already parents to one-year-old son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor. And what started out as a normal day, supposedly filled with mundane tasks at home ended up in a heartbreaking and tragic loss.
“It was a July morning that began as ordinarily as any other day: Make breakfast. Feed the dogs. Take vitamins. Find that missing sock. Pick up the rogue crayon that rolled under the table. Throw my hair in a ponytail before getting my son from his crib,” she begins. “After changing his diaper, I felt a sharp cramp. I dropped to the floor with him in my arms, humming a lullaby to keep us both calm, the cheerful tune a stark contrast to my sense that something was not right. I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.”
“Hours later, I lay in a hospital bed, holding my husband’s hand. I felt the clamminess of his palm and kissed his knuckles, wet from both our tears,” Meghan continues. “Staring at the cold white walls, my eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine how we’d heal.”
She then recalled a 2019 interview, when she candidly responded to a journalist who asked, “Are you okay?”
ICYMI, Meghan and Prince Harry went on a royal tour to South Africa just mere months since welcoming their first child. She’s had to balance her royal duties, being a new mom, and travelling with a baby the whole time – not to mention the intense public scrutiny she’s received since becoming part of the royal family.
“Thank you for asking,” was part of her reply to the journalist at the time. “Not many people have asked if I’m OK.”
But reflecting on that moment, she says it wasn’t about opening up about the pressures she’s been dealing with that helped kickstart her healing process – it was the question itself.
The tragic loss of her unborn child is one of the most difficult challenges she’s had to face in this very trying year – but she notes that countless others have had to deal with their own struggles and losses. And it’s up to everyone to check in on someone else to know how they’re holding up and to let them know someone cares. And she did just that with her husband.
“Sitting in a hospital bed, watching my husband’s heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine, I realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, ‘Are you OK?’” she wrote.
She went on how she and Harry learned how common miscarriages are – and it prompted her to speak out in an effort to encourage others to do the same.
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few. In the pain of our loss, my husband and I discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage,” she later writes. “Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.”
“Some have bravely shared their stories; they have opened the door, knowing that when one person speaks truth, it gives license for all of us to do the same,” Meghan continues. “We have learned that when people ask how any of us are doing, and when they really listen to the answer, with an open heart and mind, the load of grief often becomes lighter — for all of us. In being invited to share our pain, together we take the first steps toward healing.”
