Meghan Markle vividly remembered the day she lost her second child with her husband, Prince Harry, in a moving piece that talks about heartaches, losses, and healing.
In an opinion piece for the New York Times titled “The Losses We Share,” the Duchess of Sussex shared the couple’s heartbreak following her miscarriage in July. She remembered it started with a cramp after she went about her usual morning routine of making breakfast, feeding the dogs, taking vitamins, and changing her son Archie’s 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,” she wrote.
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“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 continued.
She said the experience brought her back to her last tour with Prince Harry in South Africa last year, when she was “exhausted” and “breastfeeding” Archie. Amid the public criticism, she tried “to keep a brave face” and was asked by a journalist, “Are you OK?” in which she answered, “Thank you for asking. Not many people have asked if I’m OK.”
Marke said she “answered him honestly,” not knowing that what she said “would resonate with so many — new moms and older ones, and anyone who had, in their own way, been silently suffering.” She said her “off-the-cuff reply seemed to give people permission to speak their truth. But it wasn’t responding honestly that helped me most, it was the question itself.”
Fast-forward in the hospital as she watched Prince Harry’s “heart break as he tried to hold the shattered pieces of mine,” she realised that the only way to begin their healing after the miscarriage is “to first ask, ‘Are you OK?'”
Markle said “losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by a few.” She admitted that in the pain of losing their second child, she and the Duke of Sussex “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.”
At the time, Markle and Prince Harry only told close members of the royal family about her miscarriage. His family has been supportive of the couple’s loss.
