Grief is a strange and unrelenting companion. It lingers in ways that are impossible to explain, shapeshifting from pain to nostalgia to a quiet kind of love that never quite goes away. Actress Billie Lourd, daughter of the late Carrie Fisher, tried to capture that feeling in her own words on what would have been her mother’s 69th birthday. Her tribute, shared with fans on October 21, wasn’t just a remembrance—it was a raw and emotional exploration of love, loss, and what it means to keep living in the absence of the people who shaped you most.
She began her post with a reflection that so many who have lost someone young could understand: “This is the ninth 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.” There’s a certain heartbreaking honesty in those words. Time passes, but grief has its own clock. It doesn’t move at the same pace as the rest of the world. Some years it softens; others it strikes like a wave that catches you off guard. For Billie, the ache of losing her mother and grandmother so close together still feels fresh, no matter how many birthdays or anniversaries pass.
She went on to admit that she sometimes feels jealous when she meets people older than her mom would have been. It’s a quiet, unspoken resentment that many people who lose loved ones early can recognize. “Why couldn’t she have lived as long as they have?” she wrote, her words echoing the anger and confusion that accompany the kind of grief that will always feel unfair. That kind of loss, she suggested, makes even the idea of celebrating feel complicated. “So I can’t really call it a wholly happy birthday because she isn’t here to enjoy the happy.”
Billie Lourd’s relationship with her mother was always in the public eye. Carrie Fisher wasn’t just a beloved actress—she was a cultural force. To millions, she was Princess Leia, the fearless rebel leader who became a symbol of strength and wit. To Billie, she was simply “Momby.” Their bond was unique, forged in the fires of Hollywood chaos and deepened by shared humor, love, and resilience. Losing Fisher in December 2016, followed just a day later by her grandmother Debbie Reynolds, was a tragedy that felt almost too cinematic to be real. Fisher died at 60 after suffering cardiac arrest on a flight from London to Los Angeles. Reynolds, who had been planning her daughter’s funeral, suffered a stroke and passed away at 84 the very next day.
For Billie, those back-to-back losses marked the end of one era and the beginning of another—one where she had to learn to live without the two women who had defined so much of her life. Nearly a decade later, she’s still figuring out what that means. Her Instagram post about her mother’s birthday showed not just how much she misses them but how much she’s grown since their deaths.
Now 33, Billie is a mother herself. She shares two young children—five-year-old Kingston Fisher and two-year-old Jackson Joanne—with her husband, actor Austen Rydell. Becoming a parent has changed the way she sees her mother’s legacy. “It makes me so sad that she didn’t get to meet them,” she wrote, describing her kids as “magical, smart, hilarious, kind creatures.” They are, in many ways, living testaments to the women who came before them. Debbie Reynolds was known for her kindness and poise, Fisher for her wit and fierce honesty. Lourd sees flashes of both in her own children.
On her mother’s birthday, Billie described the swirl of emotions she feels as a kind of “weird soup.” It’s a metaphor that perfectly captures the contradictions of grief—the bitterness and sweetness, the anger and gratitude, the pain and peace that all mix together. “Grief is a weird soup of feelings and there are a lot of ingredients in it that are hard to swallow,” she wrote. “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.”
It’s the sort of wisdom that comes only from living through something you thought you wouldn’t survive. Lourd’s words reflect an understanding that grief doesn’t disappear; it transforms. It becomes part of you, reshaping the way you see the world. She’s learned to accept that every October 21 will be a mix of sadness and celebration, of tears and laughter. It’s not a simple day of mourning—it’s a ritual of remembrance, a way to honor Fisher’s life while acknowledging the hole her absence left behind.
That complicated grief often surfaces in her interactions with her children. Billie shared a moment that captures both the innocence of youth and the heaviness of loss. Her son Kingston recently asked her how his grandmother Carrie had died. Lourd decided to answer in a way that was both honest and age-appropriate. “I told him she didn’t take care of her body—telling him the truth without telling him the whole truth,” she explained. His response was pure and simple: “Oh, but I take care of my body!”
“Yes, you do!” she told him, adding that she and his father do too. It was a moment that reminded her of the fragility of life and the importance of teaching her kids to live with awareness and care. But it also broke her heart. “It made me more mad at her,” she admitted, acknowledging a side of grief people rarely talk about—the anger directed toward the person who’s gone.
“It’s weird being mad at a dead person because you don’t really have anywhere to put the emotion,” she said. “But it’s still there, and I’ve had to learn to allow myself to feel all the things—mad at her for not getting sober, sad for her that she wasn’t able to get sober, but also happy that she existed at all.”
Those words reveal the profound complexity of Lourd’s mourning. Fisher was open about her struggles with addiction and mental illness. She wrote about them candidly in her memoirs, including Wishful Drinking and The Princess Diarist, turning her pain into art and using humor as a shield. Billie grew up seeing both her mother’s brilliance and her battles. Now, as a mother herself, she can view those struggles through new eyes—with empathy, frustration, and love all existing at once.
In her tribute, Billie said she allows herself to be angry for a moment, but then she remembers to celebrate, too. That’s how she keeps her mother’s spirit alive—not by avoiding the pain, but by embracing it and balancing it with joy. On Carrie’s birthday, she told her followers she would share funny stories about her mom with her kids, watch one of her movies, and even eat one of her favorite foods with a Coke. “Happy birthday, momby,” she wrote in closing. “I miss you and love you more than you could ever know.”
That blend of sadness and joy, humor and heartache, defines Billie Lourd’s way of remembering. It’s the same tone her mother carried throughout her life—one that refused to separate comedy from tragedy. Fisher herself often said that pain and laughter were two sides of the same coin. Her daughter seems to have inherited that wisdom.
Carrie Fisher’s influence still reverberates across generations. Her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars saga remains one of cinema’s most iconic performances—a symbol of resilience and rebellion. But her true legacy lies beyond the galaxy far, far away. She was a writer, an activist, and a fearless truth-teller who opened up conversations about addiction, recovery, and mental health long before it was common to do so. She turned her struggles into stories, her heartbreak into humor, and her flaws into art.
Billie has followed in her footsteps in her own way. She’s built a career in acting, appearing in projects like American Horror Story, Booksmart, and Ticket to Paradise. Yet, she often admits that being Carrie Fisher’s daughter is something she feels, not something she performs. She carries her mother’s spirit into her own work, even when the roles are different. There’s a shared boldness—a refusal to play small, a sense of humor that cuts through pain, and an ability to find beauty in imperfection.
In interviews, Billie has spoken about how she continues to introduce her children to the grandmother they never got to meet. She tells them stories about Fisher’s quirks, her laughter, her fierce intelligence. She wants them to know the woman behind the legend—the mother who made her laugh until she cried, the friend who always told the truth, even when it was messy. “I want them to know her as the brilliant, magical human she was,” Billie wrote.
The relationship between Fisher and her own mother, Debbie Reynolds, was famously complex yet deeply loving. The two shared the screen in the documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, which chronicled their bond during their final years. It showed Fisher caring for her aging mother while also navigating her own challenges. Their love was imperfect but unconditional, built on humor, honesty, and a shared resilience that now lives on in Billie.
When Reynolds passed away just one day after Fisher, she reportedly said, “I want to be with Carrie.” It was a heartbreaking yet beautiful reflection of their closeness—a mother unable to live in a world without her daughter. For Billie, that loss was a double blow, one that reshaped her forever. But in the years since, she has found ways to channel that pain into growth.
She’s learned to live with the “weird soup” of grief, to stir it without expecting it to ever be fully smooth. Some days, the soup is bitter and hard to swallow; on others, it’s warm and comforting. But every day, it’s a reminder of the love that still exists beneath the sadness. Her openness about grief has made her a voice for others who struggle to articulate their own pain. She doesn’t sugarcoat it. She doesn’t pretend it gets easier. Instead, she talks about how it changes, how it teaches, and how it stays.
The truth is that grief never really ends—it just becomes part of the rhythm of your life. It shows up in unexpected moments: a song, a scent, a familiar laugh from your child. Billie Lourd has learned to live alongside it rather than fight against it. She has turned mourning into meaning, just as her mother once turned her pain into art.
Carrie Fisher once wrote, “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” That line has become something of a guiding principle for Billie, who has followed it not just in her career but in her way of living. Her tribute to her mother on her birthday was more than just a post—it was a piece of that art. It was an honest, vulnerable, and deeply human reflection on what it means to love someone who’s gone.
Nine birthdays later, Billie Lourd continues to celebrate her mother’s life in the only way she knows how—with truth, humor, and heart. She acknowledges the pain, lets herself feel the anger, tells the funny stories, and finds ways to laugh through the tears. Because, in the end, that’s what Carrie Fisher taught the world: that life, like grief, is messy and beautiful and absurd all at once.
So when Billie calls her grief a “weird soup,” she’s not just describing sadness—she’s describing the human condition. It’s the recipe for survival, made up of tears, memories, laughter, guilt, gratitude, and love. It’s not always the tastiest thing, but it’s real, and it’s what keeps her connected to her mother and grandmother in every sense that matters.
And as she tells her kids stories about their grandmother—stories full of laughter, chaos, and love—she ensures that Carrie Fisher’s legacy lives on, not just in the films that made her famous, but in the family that continues to honor her spirit. On days like her mother’s birthday, Billie reminds the world that grief isn’t just about loss—it’s also about love that refuses to fade, a love that keeps showing up, year after year, in the soup of life.
