Last year, when Meghan Markle was a new mom plagued by exhaustion, a journalist's simple question served as a surprise salve: "Are you OK?" In an opinion piece in the New York Times, the Duchess of Sussex says those three words are what she said to her own husband, Harry, this summer when she suffered a miscarriage, losing their second child, and she hopes those words can be a "path to healing" for all of us as we keep stumbling our way through a year filled with loss, grief, and pain. Markle runs through all of those stumbling blocks we've faced in 2020, from the sickness and isolation of COVID-19, to racial injustice and the strife that results because of it, to misinformation and political polarization that's gone viral.
"Peaceful protests become violent," she writes. "Health rapidly shifts to sickness. In places where there was once community, there is now division." Using her miscarriage as an illustration of the "solitary mourning" we're all enduring now, Markle says we can begin to take steps to share our pain and help each other get through it. Those three words—"Are you OK?"—are a start. "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," she writes. "For the first time, in a long time, as human beings, we are really seeing one another." Read her full piece here. (Chrissy Teigen detailed the loss of her third child in an emotional essay last month.)
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