Reflecting on the past. Meghan Markle revealed that she and husband Prince Harry suffered a miscarriage earlier this year in an op-ed written for The New York Times titled “The Losses We Share,” which was released on Wednesday, November 25.
“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second,” the former Suits star, 39, wrote after chronicling a normal July morning in her life. Markle recalled experiencing “a sharp cramp,” adding that she “dropped to the floor” while holding her and The Duke of Sussex’s son, Archie, now 18 months old. She then detailed an emotional moment at the hospital and recounted holding her 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,” she wrote. “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 also reflected on an interview from September 2019 when a journalist, who was traveling with the couple on a royal tour, asked her, “Are you OK?” At the time, she remembered feeling “exhausted” but keeping “a brave face in the very public eye.” Following her miscarriage, she looked back at this particular moment and “realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, ‘Are you OK?’”
“Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by a few,” the former actress wrote. “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.”
She concluded the piece by urging readers to “commit to asking others, ‘Are you OK?’”
“For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another,” Markle added. “Are we OK? We will be.”
https://radaronline.com/exclusives/2020/11/meghan-markle-reveals-she-suffered-a-miscarriage-in-july-reflects-on-her-unbearable-grief/