Meghan Markle is opening up about “unbearable grief” after suffering a miscarriage over the summer. In a new piece for the New York Times, published Wednesday, Nov. 25, the Duchess of Sussex shared the heartbreaking news publicly for the first time, explaining that this particular July morning “began as ordinarily as any other day.” “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 of her routine with her and Prince Harry’s son, Archie Harrison. “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.” Meghan continued, “I knew, as I clutched my firstborn child, that I was losing my second.” In her piece, Meghan recalled going to the hospital with her husband by her side, holding his hand. “I felt the clamminess of his palm and kissed his knuckles,” she said, “wet from both our tears, Staring at the cold white walls, my eyes glazed over. I tried to imagine how we’d heal.” She then reflected on the couple’s 2019 royal tour in South Africa, during which a journalist asked Meghan, amid all of the pressures in the public eye, “Are you OK?” Reflecting on that honest moment with the reporter, Meghan 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?'” Meghan went on to write that losing a child “means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few.” “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,” she said. “Yet despite the staggering commonality of this pain, the conversation remains taboo, riddled with shame, and perpetuating a cycle of solitary mourning.” As we approach the holiday season, amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and social injustice, Meghan is hoping that we can all still check in on each other, asking, “Are you OK?” “We are adjusting to a new normal where faces are concealed by masks, but it’s forcing us to look into one another’s eyes—sometimes filled with warmth, other times with tears. For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another,” she concluded her piece. “Are we OK? We will be.”