Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has written an essay about the grief she and Prince Harry dealt with after she suffered a miscarriage earlier this year.
Writing for the New York Times, Markle described when she knew something was wrong after she "dropped to the floor" in pain while changing her son Archie's diaper. "I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child that I was losing my second,” she wrote in the emotional essay. “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. Staring at the cold white walls, my eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine how we’d heal."
Markle addressed the stigma around miscarriage, and noted that she "discovered that in a room of 100 women, 10 to 20 of them will have suffered from miscarriage." The conversation around it, however, remains too taboo for many. "Riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning," she said. Many women (including Chrissy Teigen last month) have shared their own stories of pregnancy loss, which Markle said encouraged her to "take the first steps toward healing."
She wrote that like many others, 2020 has been a particuarly rough year for her. "Loss and pain have plagued every one of us in 2020, in moments both fraught and debilitating," she wrote. "Sitting in a hospital bed, watching my husband's heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine, I realize that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, 'Are you OK?'"
Elaborating more on just how dark 2020 has been for so many, she wrote of the scores of people who've lost people COVID-19. She also spoke about the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, who were both killed by police officers. "A young woman named Breonna Taylor ggoesoest to sleep, just as she's done every night before, but she doesn't live to see the morning because a police raid turns horribly wrong," she continued. "George Floyd leaves a convenience store, not realizing he will take his last breath under the weight of someone's knee, and in his final moments, calls out for his mom."
Concluding her essay, Markle ended on something of a more hopeful note "We are adjusting to a new normal where faces are concealed by masks, but it’s forcing us to look into one another’s eyes—sometimes filled with warmth, other times with tears," she wrote. "For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another. Are we OK? We will be."
Read the full essay here.
