Heartbreaking news from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex today, as Meghan Markle has revealed that she suffered a miscarriage in July of this year.
Meghan went public with the news in an op-ed that she penned for the New York Times.
Until today, it was not public knowledge that Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry, had been expecting a second child.
The Duchess began her account with a description of a typical morning that took a tragic turn.
“Make breakfast. Feed the dogs. Take vitamins. Find that missing sock. Pick up the rogue crayon that rolled under the table. Throw my hair in a ponytail before getting my son from his crib,” she wrote.
“After changing his 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,” she continued.
“I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.”
Yes, it seems Meghan’s son, Archie, was present when she began to experience signs of trouble with her second pregnancy.
She went on to offer an account of being admitted to the hospital and sharing her pain with her husband.
“I felt the clamminess of his palm and kissed his knuckles, wet from both our tears,” Meghan wrote.
“Staring at the cold white walls, my eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine how we’d heal.”
In the piece, entitled "The Losses We Share," Meghan writes that found the key to her own healing in helping others cope with their grief.
"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," she wrote.
"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?’"
The compassion that began in that hospital room expanded to include the many other women who have lost children or pregnancies.
"Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few," she wrote.
The response to Meghan’s heartfelt and extremely personal essay has been overwhelmingly positive, with many commenters thanking her for her courage and sharing their own tales of loss.
Meghan and Harry moved to Los Angeles back in March, an unprecedented move for members of the British Royal Family.
Part of their reason for doing so was to escape the notoriously relentless British tabloid press and gain some control over the ways their personal narratives are presented to the public.
With the publication of this essay, Meghan has taken an important step toward doing exactly that.