Billie Lourd Reflects on Loss of Mom Carrie Fisher on 69th Birthday

By newadmin / Published on Tuesday, 21 Oct 2025 17:02 PM / No Comments / 0 views

On what would have been Carrie Fisher’s 69th birthday, Billie Lourd — among the most private of actors — posted a very personal and emotional tribute to her mother on her Instagram account.

“My mom would’ve been 69 years old today,” Lourd wrote. “Which still feels shockingly young because 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? … Every time I meet someone older than her I’m secretly jealous. Why couldn’t she have lived as long as they have? Anyone out there who has lost a loved one too young can maybe relate? So I can’t really call it a wholly happy birthday cause she isn’t here to enjoy the happy.”

Fisher died on Dec. 27, 2016, after going into cardiac arrest on a flight from London to Los Angeles. Sleep apnea, as well as a variety of drugs in her system, were later determined to be the causes of death. As Fisher said in 2013 of her ongoing addiction and mental health issues, “The only lesson for me, or anybody, is that you have to get help. I’m not embarrassed.” In 2023, Lourd attended her mother’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, wearing a dress festooned with an image of Fisher as Princess Leia.

In her Instagram homage to Fisher, Lourd brought up her two children, Jackson Joanne and Kingston, from her marriage to Austin 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. … 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. And made me mad at her. It’s weird being mad at a dead person because you don’t really have anywhere to put the emotion. 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 but also sad for her that she wasn’t able to get sober but also happy that she existed at all.”

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Referring again to her own family, Lourd wrote, “She was a brilliant magical human and I want them to know that. So despite the many emotions I have on these days I try to celebrate the good parts. I’ll tell my kids funny stories about her, watch one of her movies, eat one of her favorite foods, have a Coke with a shit ton of ice. 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.”

Lourd, who’s had her own acting career for well over a decade, can currently be seen in director Alex Winter’s comedy Adulthood, which opened last month. Alongside Monica Barbaro and Jason Schwartzman, she’s also been cast in Artificial, the upcoming feature on the early days of AI starring Andrew Garfield as OpenAI executive Sam Altman.