Meghan Markle reveals she suffered miscarriage in July: ‘Unbearable grief’
The more people share their stories of loss, Markle opines, the load for everyone mourning lightens.
In a moving first-person essay, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, announced that she experienced a pregnancy loss this summer.
Her essay, written for The New York Times, touches on not just the loss suffered by the actress, feminist and advocate and her husband, Prince Harry, but also the periods of mourning that hundreds of thousands of families are experiencing.
Markle writes: “I realized that the only way to begin to heal is to first ask, ‘Are you OK?’”
“This year has brought so many of us to our breaking points,” she asserts. “Loss and pain have plagued every one of us in 2020, in moments both fraught and debilitating.”
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The Duchess acknowledged the hundreds of thousands who have died from coronavirus, as well as victims of police violence.
“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,” writes Markle. “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,” she notes. “In places where there was once community, there is now division.”
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In the essay, titled “The Losses We Share,” Markle writes that while many women experience a miscarriage at a “staggering commonality,” the conversation is taboo and “riddled with (unwarranted) shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.”
She opines that the more people share their stories, the load of grief for us all gets lighter. She encourages Americans to together “take the first steps toward healing.”
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Markle says while this Thanksgiving is going to be different from any before, we, as a nation, should commit to asking each other, “Are you OK?”
She concludes that as Americans adjust to a “new normal,” wearing face coverings “forcing us to look into one another’s eyes,” we’ve entered a period in which we should try to truly see each other.
“Are we OK? We will be.”
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