Hanna Green’s life was one that began and ended in perfect symmetry. Sixteen years in completion… and although it was a life brief in years, it was vast in love; immense in learning, in meaning, and in light.
How do you begin to honour such a rare, radiant soul on this, the seventeenth anniversary of her birth and the first of her death?
Perhaps, like many things too big for words, we can look to nature. Mother Earth speaks not with explanations but with metaphors. With her constant reminders. With her cycles and rhythms. Among Hanna’s great loves were watching night skies filled with stars, growing sunflowers, and loving delicate, endangered turtles. So, I’ll turn to them for their help…
One of the most powerful illustrations of both beginnings and endings is a supernova; that’s the word that describes the final, most brilliant act of a dying star. Stars are born when hydrogen atoms fuse in the cold of space, lighting up the darkness for billions of years. But when that process ends, when the star can no longer hold itself together, it explodes in a radiant burst of energy. In death, it outshines entire galaxies. And as it does so, it sends its building blocks of other beings and entities across the universe. These become planets. Oceans. Trees. People. They become you and me. So when a life ends – even when it’s far, far too soon for us to contemplate with any understanding – it does not vanish. The light continues. The elements remain, reshaped. Their love lives on in new forms, just like the stardust we’re made of.
There’s so much beyond our current comprehension about someone being born and dying on the same date. And yet, when you think about it, this cycle is everywhere…in the perfect symmetries of Gaia. The sun returns to the same place in the sky, tracing a perfect circle…a full revolution. Although this symmetry can feel both piercing and profound, there’s a completeness to it, even in the midst of tragedy.
And in that painful symmetry, nature speaks again. A sunflower, for example, turns its face toward the sun each day, tracking its light across the sky. Sunflowers symbolise adoration, loyalty, and the persistence of hope, even in the darkest of times. They remind us that grief is not an end to love, but another form of it. Even when our hearts are broken open, they too still turn instinctively toward the light. I see all of Hanna’s family doing that now. Perhaps that’s why sunflowers are so comforting in grief. Their golden faces look like miniature suns, radiant and resolute, even as summer fades. They bloom, they bow, they return again.
And then, there are the turtles. So small. So slow. So easily overlooked. And yet, they are ancient symbols of endurance, protection, and quiet resilience. Turtles carry their homes on their backs…a reminder that we all carry what is most precious with us. Something vulnerable, yes, but also strong enough to weather life’s storms. They emerge from their shells in their own time, in their own way. They know how to retreat, how to rest, how to begin again.
In grief, we often feel exposed and raw, as if we’ve lost our shell. But the turtle reminds us that healing does not need to be fast or loud.
It can be slow. It can be gentle. It can be deliberate. It can happen beneath the surface, as we learn again to move forward with care, with memory, with meaning. Hanna saw the magic in turtles. She loved them not just for their vulnerability, but for their quiet strength and maybe she saw something of herself in them. Delicate and determined; beautiful and rare.
So how do we remember someone who left this earth on the same day they arrived in it?
We remember them the way nature remembers – not just with fixed monuments – but with living, breathing symbols:
We plant sunflowers. Watch them grow tall and proud, even in rough soil. We gaze at the stars and whisper their name to the vastness. We honour their day not just in mourning, but in movement …through a walk along the sands, a swim in the sea, a dance beneath the moon. We light a candle, not just to grieve their absence but to acknowledge their continued presence in the way they changed us.
But, most importantly, we live. We become the stardust that shapes new worlds. We carry their memory not as a heavy burden, but as a spark that lights our own becoming.
The story of a life that begins and ends on the same date is not just a circle…
It’s a spiral.
Grief, love, memory…all of these things move us forward, never back, even as we return again and again to a particular day.
In time, this date might hurt a little less. It might even become a day of connection, of planting, of lighting, of remembering. It might become a day of sunflowers. A day of stargazing. A day for turtle-watching, or simply for sitting so still with anything that is precious to us.
Let the sunflowers bloom.
Let the stars remind you.
Let the light – Hanna’s and yours – keep flickering. Because what she loved most still surrounds us:
The stars: vast, bright, eternal.
The sunflowers: strong, loyal, reaching.
And the turtles: slow, gentle, enduring.
She is in all of them.
And in us.
And she will never fade.
Latansani 