Happy 11th birthday precious Bella!

by Recover the gift

Our precious Belsie

Today would have been your 11th birthday.

Eleven years ago, you blessed me with the honour of being your mum. That day is still so clear to me, etched into my memory forever.

The day of your birth feels particularly poignant today because you were born on a Sunday, and today is Sunday. Eleven years ago, we had only been living in our new home for six weeks. Our floors needed some extra attention, which meant we had to be out of the house for the whole of Saturday. We kept ourselves busy in the morning and then went to a friend’s son’s 2nd birthday party in the afternoon. We didn’t get home until around 6:30pm and then put Murray to bed, carefully trying not to walk on the floors.

Just before 5am the next morning, I woke to go for a wee and my waters broke. I was only 36 weeks pregnant, slightly earlier than planned, but you were clearly in a hurry to get into the world. I phoned the labour ward and they asked me to come into the hospital. We contacted our nanny to come and look after Murray and sent an Uber to pick her up. The day before, my car had broken down in the garage, so I couldn’t drive myself to the hospital. James stayed behind with Murray to wait for our nanny, while I ordered an Uber to take me in. I’m fairly certain that the Uber driver had never had a woman in labour in his car before.

I settled into the hospital and your dad joined me as soon as he could. Thankfully, Steffi was on call and came to deliver you. You arrived just after 12pm, calmly and without much fanfare. They placed you into my arms and, in that moment, you embedded yourself in my heart forever. Our precious, precious little girl. Our Bella.

I remember that day so clearly—every detail of it. I hold onto those details tightly, because they are all I have left now.

My Belsie, your life, and your death, have moulded and shaped me in ways I never could have imagined. I am a completely different person to who I was eleven years ago. I like to think that losing you has softened me, given me more patience, and taught me to hold the picture of what life should look like a little more loosely.

This journey of grief is so hard. The hardness never really goes away. You learn to live with it. You bury it in certain ways. And over time, you learn how to function on the surface of life again. But it is always there, just beneath the surface, waiting to be triggered by something, or sometimes, by nothing at all.

Days like today are particularly hard because of all the unanswered questions. All the wondering. All the not knowing. The fact that we don’t get to celebrate your 11th birthday with you. The fact that I don’t know what you would have looked like, what your likes and dislikes would have been, who your friends would have been, or what kind of relationship you would have shared with your darling brother.

I asked ChatGPT to create an image of what you might have looked like at 11 years old. I thought it might make me feel a little better. It didn’t. It made me feel so much worse. It felt like a sucker punch to the stomach, a reminder of everything I don’t know and will never know.

Your dad, your brother, and I went out for lunch today to celebrate you. Every year, Murray understands a little more, and every year he surprises me with the depth of his emotions. When I told him that today would have been your 11th birthday, he sat quietly in the car for a minute or two, then turned to me and asked, “Mom, how are you feeling today?”. What an extraordinary young man. Your death has been so hard for all of us, on so many different levels, but it has also taught us deep emotional intuition and resilience. I am so, so proud of him.

During my coaching course last year, we created a grief journal as one of our projects. The words we wrote for the introduction speak so aptly to grief and how it morphs and changes over time. I want to share them here.

Grief is like being handed a book we never asked for – one that suddenly appears in our hands the moment our world changes. We didn’t choose it. We can’t put it down. And no matter how desperately we want to, we can’t skip to the end.

The cover is heavy. It carries the title of our loss. At first, just looking at it is overwhelming. We may not even want to open it. This book doesn’t have page numbers or chapters. It’s chaotic and confusing. The words blur together – shock, denial, disbelief. The pages are often stained with tears. The story doesn’t make sense, and yet it’s ours.

Each day we pick up our book and open it at a different place, inviting in, often times resentfully, our emotions. As we explore the book, we move through different emotions, often coming to the same emotion again and again, ones we thought we had put behind us:

• Anger bursts through in capital letters.
• Sadness is written in long, slow sentences that ache with silence.
• Guilt scribbles notes in the margins, interrupting the flow with “what if” and “should have.”
• Loneliness leaves blank pages you stare at for hours, searching for something or someone who is no longer there.

There is no order. There’s no final page where everything is resolved. As we discover each page, with patience and honesty, we get to that quiet, raw place where the real grief lives. And it’s only from that place that we can begin to understand ourselves, not just what we’ve lost, but who we are becoming in the wake of that loss.

And so we slowly learn to carry the book with us. It becomes part of our library – a volume we never shelve completely, but which no longer consumes all our attention. Over time, we may even return to parts of it with tenderness, revisiting memories like old lines of poetry. The story doesn’t change, but our relationship to it does. New chapters of life are written in other books—but this one remains on our shelf, worn and sacred. It shaped us. It changed our story.

So today, my darling girl, I feel that book heavy in my hands again. Some days it rests quietly on the shelf, but today it is open, its pages worn and tender. I don’t read it to hurt myself, I read it because it holds you. Every page is written in love, even the ones soaked with tears.

This is not a story I ever wanted, but it is part of who I am now because you are part of me. You are part of every breath I take, every choice I make, every version of myself that exists now. I carry your book with me always, not just in grief, but in the way I live, love, and mother your brother. Your story didn’t end, it simply changed form.

What I have learnt, my sweet girl, is that I l won’t ever “get over” you. I have become someone who knows how to carry joy and heartbreak at the same time. Someone who can laugh freely and still feel the ache of missing you in the very same breath without guilt. Loving you has stretched my heart wide enough to hold both, to exist in the “and”, and that, too, is part of who you made me. You live in the space where happiness and sorrow meet, and I have learned that it is possible to exist there, because of you.

Happy 11th birthday, my precious Bella. You are forever written into my heart, line by line, page by page.

Always loved. Always carried,

Your mom