This year hasn’t been easy for so many, even beyond the daily horrors of the pandemic, the other unexpected personal tragedies we often are forced to face haven’t let up either. Meghan Markle, The Duchess of Sussex, has revealed that she suffered a miscarriage this year.
In a heartfelt opinion piece for The New York Times, Markle, who’s married to Prince Harry, opened up about a miscarriage she suffered in July while changing their son Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor’s diaper. She described first feeling a “sharp cramp” and knowing something was wrong.
“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,” Markle wrote in the piece. “I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.”
Markle went on to share her and her husband’s heartbreaking moments in the hospital after hearing the news.
“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 in the essay, appropriately titles The Losses We Share. Markle acknowledged that she isn’t the only woman who has suffered in silence form the loss of a child and the topic is still something we must all bring more awareness too.
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” wrote Markle. “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. Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.”
Markle, a member of the British Royal Family, has devoted her life to service and didn’t shy away from making sure those reading her personal story also saw the bigger picture—this year has been a challenging one for everyone and America remains a nation divided.
“A young woman named Breonna Taylor goes 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,” Markel writes. “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. Peaceful protests become violent. Health rapidly shifts to sickness. In places where there was once community, there is now division.”