Billie Lourd is mourning her mother, Carrie Fisher.
Fisher died at age 60 in December 2016 following a heart attack. Lourd took to Instagram on Tuesday to pay tribute to her mother on what would have been Fisher’s 69th birthday. She shared a photo of herself, Fisher and her maternal grandmother, the late Debbie Reynolds, alongside a lengthy caption.
“My mom would’ve been 69 years old today. Which still feels shockingly young because this is the 9th birthday of hers I’ve ‘celebrated’ without her. It feels like she has been dead so long that she should be 100 at this point? It feels more okay for a 100 year old person to be dead? But not a 69 year old,” Lourd wrote.
Lourd then went on to express how Fisher never got to meet her grandchildren. Lourd shares two children — a 5-year-old son named Kingston Fisher Lourd Rydell and 3-year-old daughter named Jackson Joanne Lourd Rydell — with husband Austen Rydell.
“The other night my son asked me how she died – I told him that she didn’t take care of her body – telling him the truth without telling him the whole truth. ‘Oh but I take care of my body!’ Yes I replied, ‘Yes you do! And I do too and daddy does too!'” Lourd wrote. “Death isn’t looming at our doorsteps the way it always was for her. That’s a conversation for later years. He didn’t push me for more answers so we left it at that. But it broke my heart.”
While Lourd wrote about her grief, she also said she wanted Fisher’s birthday to “have some happy in it.”
“Especially for my kids. She was a brilliant magical human and I want them to know that,” Lourd wrote. “Grief is a weird soup of feelings and there are a lot of ingredients in it that are hard to swallow, but ultimately I think the soup has made me healthier – more cognizant of how short life is and more appreciative of all the happy in my life.”
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