Dear Saoirse,
One year. One full turn of the earth around the sun since you came into our arms and changed everything we thought we knew about love, about loss, about what it means to be alive.
The days before your birthday were hard. There were conflicts between us, uncertainty, and a heaviness that we couldn’t quite name. And then, quietly, something shifted. Because two weeks before today, mommy’s body started to remember. Every kick. Every hiccup from last year, this time, returning in her body’s memory. The confrontation with that reality was paralyzing at first — there was nothing to do but feel it all over again.
But today. Today was different.
We began the morning with a man who channels plants — who listens to them and connects people to their spirit plants, the way others speak of spirit animals. We had come with something sacred: your placenta, which mommy has held onto, waiting for the right moment and the right place to return it to the earth. We wanted him to find a plant for you, little selkie. But he told us gently that because you are not in this realm, he couldn’t reach you through the plants. Instead, he found one for mommy, and one for daddy. We stood before them and felt them working — quietly, powerfully — like they were charging something that had run low inside us.
And then we walked to the labyrinth.
It’s a beautiful thing — a path of stones laid out in a spiral in nature, one and a half kilometers altogether, meant to bring you back to yourself. We walked it with Diuna at our side, and the bees were buzzing, and a butterfly drifted through, and somewhere in the middle of the bushes there was a gardener, hidden away, completely at peace with his own quiet work. The whole place felt like being held in the womb of mother earth.
Daddy felt you there, Saoirse. All of a sudden you were so close — laughing, walking alongside him, saying daddy. He hasn’t felt joy like that in a very long time. It arrived without warning and without permission, the way joy sometimes does after a long grief — just there, full and real. For the first time in a year, something that had been opposite to joy began to release.
Mommy felt you differently — through the earth itself. She could hear the labyrinth speaking, feel the presence of mother earth and you together, as if you were both whispering to her at the same time. Directions. Inspirations. A sense of knowing what to do now that hadn’t been there before. And for the first time in this whole year, mommy could give love to her womb. Could honor her body for what it did — for bringing you here, for the miracle of that. There hadn’t been space for that before. Today, there was.
On the way home, we walked through a corridor of tall trees. Mommy stopped to hug one. It told her it was honored — honored to feel her presence. We don’t need you to believe that the way we believe it. We only want you to know that the world was speaking to us today in every direction we turned.
And then opa and oma arrived at the door. They brought a big Easter candle — the biggest one, the kind that lights a whole church. Mommy had been talking about wanting a big candle all day long. She had said she wanted one that could burn for three full days, from your birthday to the day you left. They didn’t know that. They just came, and they brought it.
That is how this day has been, Saoirse. Everything arriving exactly when it needed to.
A year of this has taught us things we could not have learned any other way.
To the parents who are reading this at day one, week one, month one — we want to say this: there is no manual. Grief will surprise you, constantly, in ways you cannot prepare for. It will be always in the background whether you want it there or not, and it will come in all kinds of forms — as rage, as numbness, as a thought you cannot place, as a memory surfacing in your body without warning. When that happens, know that it is grief. And it will wait for you until you are ready.
Allow the feelings when they come. Not beyond what you can hold — you cannot jump higher than yourself, and sometimes you need rest, nourishment, ordinary life rolling forward. That is not failure. But sooner or later, the feelings will return. And through them, through that very pain, you stay connected to your child. The pain is not separate from the love. It is the love, finding its way through.
Our grief is not the same. Mommy goes deep — free-diving, all the way to the bottom. Daddy’s grief comes with a delay, builds quietly, then arrives in waves that sometimes knock him off his feet. There is no one right way. Give each other space to grieve as you must.
What we know after one year is this: there is a difference between knowing and believing. Daddy knows you are here, Saoirse. He has always known. The believing comes and goes — some days it is close, some days it hides. But the knowing holds. And it is the knowing that carries us.
We are proud. Of ourselves, of each other, of the wobbly, chaotic, difficult, beautiful year we have somehow moved through. We are proud parents. That does not need a child in a room to be true. You are with us — in the labyrinth, in the trees, in the rabbit who always finds his way home, in the candle burning now on our table.
Happy birthday, our little selkie.
With all our love, Mommy and Daddy
