On what would have been Carrie Fisher’s 69th birthday, her daughter Billie Lourd took to Instagram to share a deeply personal reflection. In the post, Lourd opened up about the complicated emotions of losing her mother, admitting that she sometimes feels anger alongside her grief, while also cherishing the joy and love Carrie brought into her life.
The Complex Emotions of Missing Carrie Fisher
Grief can take many shapes, and for Billie Lourd, one of them is anger. She admitted that, even after nine years, she sometimes feels mad at Fisher — a feeling she’s learned to accept as part of loving someone who struggled so much and died too soon.
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Lourd described a tender but painful conversation with her young son, who recently asked how his grandmother died. “She didn’t take care of her body,” she told him, calling it “the truth without the whole truth.” The question, she said, “broke my heart and made me mad at her.” It was an emotion she didn’t expect to feel so sharply after all these years, but it resurfaced as she reflected on Fisher’s lifelong battle with addiction and how “death was always looming at her door.”
“It’s weird being mad at a dead person because you don’t really have anywhere to put the emotion,” Lourd wrote. “Mad at her for not getting sober but also sad for her that she wasn’t able to get sober but also happy that she existed at all.” Her words painted an intimate portrait of grief in all its contradictions. The ache of loss mixed with the gratitude of having loved someone so extraordinary, even if imperfectly.
Still, amid the pain, Lourd found space for celebration. She shared that she wants her mother’s birthday “to have some happy in it,” especially for her children, who never had the chance to meet their “brilliant magical” grandmother. So she keeps Fisher’s memory alive through stories, movies, and the little things — like having “a Coke with a ton of ice.” For Lourd, honoring her mom means embracing every emotion, from anger to joy, and understanding that grief, as she put it, “is a weird soup of feelings” that ultimately makes life more meaningful.
