Saoirse

Five months and two days. That’s how long it’s been since Saoirse left her body. That’s how long we’ve been learning to live in a world where our daughter exists everywhere and nowhere at once.

The Pictures

Today we took a significant step. We looked at the photographs.

There were three sets of images, each capturing different moments of Saoirse’s brief time with us. The first were taken by Annette, a nurse at Radboud Hospital in Nijmegen. The second came from a professional photographer with the Make a Memory foundation, who offered her services free of charge with such gentleness and grace. The third set we took ourselves as we prepared Saoirse’s body for her farewell ceremony.

Looking at these pictures created distance and closeness simultaneously. They’re memories frozen in time, yet they bring us right back to those precious, painful moments. What struck us most was a simple realization: we wish we had taken more. Every photograph tells part of the story, brings us closer to those moments we can never return to in body, only in memory.

There’s one photo in particular—Sebastiaan taking a selfie with Saoirse’s body. Someone might say that’s creepy. But when you’ve lost a child, when all you have left are these moments captured in pixels and paper, you understand. These are the only times we can be face to face, skin to skin with our beautiful daughter. These images aren’t morbid; they’re sacred.

The Rollercoaster That Never Stops

This grief is a rollercoaster that will most likely never stop. But it changes. Five months feels profoundly different from four months, which felt different from one month. The transformation happens slowly, almost imperceptibly, yet when you look back, it’s massive.

I feel like a different person now.

There’s more darkness around me—not bad energy, but the energy of death itself. It’s the opposite of light, the reverse side of the same coin. And because my daughter exists in that darkness, I find myself balanced between worlds, making conscious decisions each day to step toward the light while honoring the part of me that died when she did.

Before and After

There was a before, and there is an after. This is undeniable.

But strangely, after Saoirse’s passing, there is somehow more life. I cannot explain this paradox, but I can feel it. A door opened that I didn’t know existed, revealing dimensions of existence I’d never touched before.

The difference between living and dying becomes startlingly clear when you stand at that threshold. When you lose someone so close—especially your child—you come to the very edge of death. You can almost see what’s on the other side. You can definitely feel it, because that’s where your baby is.

Accepting death, truly accepting it, changes everything. The border between life and death, between light and dark, is profoundly thin. And when you start looking beyond it, there’s something attractive there, something magnetic.

Signs and Presence

Today, as we looked at the photographs, we lit a candle. The calendar fell from the wall. Both of us felt Saoirse’s presence in our house.

Then I smelled her. Really smelled her, that aroma, that essence I was so afraid of losing. She came because she can, because she is everything now. She appears in important moments: as a stream of light through the forest, as the sensation of her holding my hand, as her touch in my hair.

One morning we woke to find tiny feathers scattered across our garden, all over the garden as if an angel had flown overhead and sprinkled them everywhere. To this day, I cannot explain where they came from. You just know. There are no doubts about these small miracles. She wants us to know she’s still here, still in touch, just in a new, strange way.

We balance between worlds, looking for signs from the other side. It’s complicated to explain, but anyone who has experienced this kind of loss might understand. It’s something you feel rather than think.

The Photographs: Before and After

The Make a Memory photographer did two sessions with us. The difference between them tells its own story.

In the first session, Saoirse was still breathing with the help of machines. All those tubes and wires—we called them “the spaghetti”—connected her to this world. In those images, you can see us as proud parents. There’s pain, yes, but also something else: hope, perhaps, or not yet knowing what would happen. A tiny wish that maybe she would start breathing on her own, that her little heart would keep beating without intervention.

I always believed it was her choice whether to stay or not. The body made its choice, but miracles do exist. Though now I wonder: what is a miracle, really?

She could have chosen to recover, but she made a different choice. Or perhaps she always made the same choice, and we just couldn’t see it yet.

What Does Recovery Mean?

I had a profound conversation with a dear friend from Finland who was present throughout my pregnancy and when Saoirse left her body. She offered a reflection that continues to reshape my understanding:

Look at this world. Look at the struggles people face, the wars, the suffering, these eternal bodies of ours that can disappear in an instant. Life is beautiful and joyful, yes, but it can also be incredibly tough. If you have the choice to not enter a body, to not limit yourself to physicality, but instead to be everything—isn’t that the upgraded choice?

To go from something limited to something infinite, from contained to boundless.

But from a human perspective, from a mother’s perspective, this understanding is almost impossible to fully embrace.

The Love She Brought

Saoirse came and brought love. So much love that perhaps she couldn’t contain it all in one small body.

When she lay in the hospital, things began to make different sense to me. It’s hard to explain in words, but I felt an initiation happening—something shamanic, something profound. She created this initiation, generated a kind of love that reached beyond just Sebastiaan and me to touch many people around us.

She has come to me many times since. She channels herself through me and speaks: *Mom, I’m going to take care of you now. You took care of me for nine months. You took care of my body for the short time I was here. But I’m beyond that now.*

It’s hard to understand as a mother. I want to physically touch my baby, to give her my breath, to feed her, to hold her. But she’s not there in that way. She’s somewhere else, yet sometimes I can almost touch her, almost smell her.

This physicality—or the absence of it—is the most painful and difficult experience. The human mother in me wants what I cannot have, and sometimes I feel I cannot live with this loss.

Finding Strength

Today was the first time I felt I could lift myself.

During my Kundalini yoga practice—which I commit to thanks to a friend who pushes me onto the mat when I have no motivation—I was doing an exercise and needed to lift myself one more time. And I felt it: I can do this. I can lift myself.

That small moment of physical strength mirrored something shifting inside. It kicked me into recording this conversation, into committing to documenting our journey through grief.

The Shamanic Trance

A few days after Saoirse passed, while her body was still with us at home, I was pumping breast milk. Each time I did it, I felt like I was on the edge of passing out. I wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating much. I was in full postpartum chaos—hormones, trauma, a trance-like state I imagine resembles shamanic journeying.

Then I died.

Not literally, but I experienced something like death. I fell asleep, but it wasn’t sleep and it wasn’t dreaming. I found myself in a dark place of silence and spaciousness where everything looked the same, but my relationship to it had completely changed. There was no attachment to anything or anyone around me. A coldness that went deep, like the breath of air in a cave that penetrates to your bones.

That was the closest I’ve come, as a living human, to death itself.

I really wanted to stay there.

Slowly, slowly, I came back. It was a fight-or-flight response, a trauma response I didn’t recognize at the time. I was completely disconnected from my body, frozen in a protective numbness because the reality was too much to bear.

Now, five months later, I’m coming back into my body. I can recognize the difference between darkness and light, between death and life. I can choose the light while honoring the darkness.

The Myth of Demeter and Persephone

Sebastiaan recommended I revisit the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone—the mother whose daughter lives in Hades, the underworld. Every year, Demeter walks down into the depths to bring her daughter back up, and there is summer. Then Persephone must return to where she belongs, back to the underworld, and winter comes.

It’s about deep diving. About a mother descending into darkness to reach her child.

As we move toward winter now, this myth resonates in ways I couldn’t have understood before Saoirse.

What We’re Learning

This process of grieving is our initiation. We are becoming parents to a baby in another dimension, learning to maintain relationship across the veil between worlds.

I miss stories that go deeper into this experience. So many grief narratives stay on the surface, and I understand why—this depth is terrifying and difficult to articulate. But we’re at the beginning of this journey, and there’s still so much to come.

That’s why we’re documenting it. To have memories of this process, to look back and see: *I was there, and now I’m here. What changed? What stayed the same? What is the path?*

The consciousness of this experience shifts daily. In five months, I see different layers of death, different shades of grief, different ways of being both with and without my daughter.

Staying on the Light Side

Thanks to friends who anchor me, I stay on the light side. Because I am easily pulled toward the dark, toward searching for Saoirse there, toward losing myself in the underworld where she dwells.

It’s attractive, that darkness. It’s where my daughter is. But the coldness I experienced in that death-trance showed me I’m not meant to stay there yet. I have more to do here, in this body, in this life.

Saoirse made her choice. She chose everything over something, infinity over limitation, spirit over body.

And I choose to honor that choice by continuing to live, even as part of me remains in the darkness with her, even as I carry her everywhere I go.

Moving Forward

We’re writing a book about this. About grieving. About losing a child. About our flavors of grief. About being parents to a baby who exists in another dimension.

It’s important to share our story, to exchange these experiences with others walking similar paths. Not because grief needs to be explained or fixed, but because in the sharing, we find we’re not alone in the darkness.

Every day I make the conscious choice to step toward the light. Not away from Saoirse, but toward life—because that’s what she brought us. That’s her gift.

More life.

Even in death, especially in death, she brought us more life.

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This is one conversation in an ongoing journey. We’ll continue documenting our path through grief, not as experts, but as parents learning to live in a world that now contains both more darkness and more light than we ever knew possible.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for walking with us.