The death of our child is a deeply personal experience so we have chosen to have a private family ceremony on the morning of 04 December 2019 in order to lay to rest the perfect body of our beautiful and much anticipated baby girl, Indie Banerji.
 
We hope that through this eulogy you, our dear friends and extended family will be able to grieve alongside us and allow Indie and her message to enter your hearts as well as enrich your lives moving forward. We thank you for joining us and have felt your immense love and support channeling through your heartfelt messages since this tragedy struck us on Tuesday 12 November 2019. For that we wholeheartedly thank you. We ask as you listen to this, that you light a candle in Indie’s memory and leave us any message you would like to on our website at . We will read each and every one over time.
 
There are many poems written about both life and death, some beautiful, some full of sorrow, some simple and some complex. Today we reflect on a simple but poignant poem by Henry Van Dyke.
 
Time is too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love, time is
Eternity.
By Henry Van Dyke
 
 
As Henry Van Dyke has captured in his poem, our family grief will take too long and the only thing we know for certain in this moment is that our love for our baby girl will last for all eternity.
 
Indie, as your mother who carried you for 9 months, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for plentiful memories that will stay with me forever, encapsulated in my unconditional love for you.  I have chosen a couple of my experiences to share today.
 
Thank you for the elated joy I felt when you wriggled in excitement at the sounds of laughter echoing out of your big sister Anoushka whilst she was being tickled senselessly by your dadda, Devraj. I know you wanted to feel those tickles too.
 
Thank you for regularly dancing with me and sharing my love of Reggae, I know these were some of your favourite moments too.  Thank you for the renewed enjoyment of music in my life as I knew it always made you happy, excited and you were always up for a dance. Thank you for being a part of our family joy as we would often howl in the car singing ‘Video killed the radio star’ and ‘I am Giant’.
 
Thank you my darling Indie for the perspective and peace you brought to me while we were one, in times where the world seemed divided or in chaos. Repeatedly you would choose to sleep peacefully inside me at the first sounds of a Brexit debate, or a heated argument between politicians usually about race, gender or inequality and your spirit full of love, peace and compassion would simply drown out anything else for me and re-centre my heart.
 
Thank you Indie for allowing me to experience one of the most empowering experiences a women can go through by the most magical personal, pain relief free labour and natural delivery. You have left me a body unscarred by this beautiful experience but a heart that has been forever changed. I trust you and I trust that this experience you have granted me is a gift from you to help me realise that perhaps I have more strength than I acknowledge at times, may I draw on this gift of strength from you to equip me well as I grief the devastation of your loss.
 
When I was three months pregnant with you Indie, I asked your dadda to come and sit with me on our stairs, I wanted to share with him what I had felt about you that day. I told him that I felt your spirit had lived a past life where you had no voice. I felt strongly that in your life with us, our job was to help you be a powerful voice for women and vulnerable children. We chatted for a long time about our hopes for you and how we could help you express your voice as well as help others do the same.
 
It is quite harrowing to feel that your voice has not been heard again through this terrible trauma. You, our beautiful Indie had no voice, no way of telling us that something was wrong, you were a victim of your vulnerability.
 
Thank you Indie for teaching me the importance of our voice and right now the only message we want you to hear is that we will love you for all eternity, as your mother the devastation of your loss will leave a wound in my heart forever. As your father I will never forget you and you will be with me forever.
 
With this in mind we ask you, dear friends to take this message forward each and every day of your lives in memory of our little girl.
 
We ask each of you bound by the beauty of marriage to listen to each others voice with authenticity, to truly understand the power of each others voice and support each other to feel safe in its expression. We ask you to respond with even more tolerance, patience and unconditional love, completely free from reprimand.
We ask every woman listening today to free her voice and release any fear that she has had to suppress it.
We ask all the parents out there to show more patience with the voices of their children as they are learning how to use it.
We ask you all to be mindful everyday and help vulnerable people whose voice are not heard to feel heard, to feel valued, to be acknowledged and to be set freer.
We ask you all to use your voice for good, to promote peace, love and friendship wherever you are in the name of our little girl Indie. We ask you to speak up against the darkness in the world and help vulnerable people in any walk of life that has meaning to you.
 
We may not have been able to protect Indies body in this life but we are wholeheartedly committed to protecting her spirit and her voice in this world forevermore.
 
Lastly, dear friends we ask you to look upon us through this time of grief, this harrowing experience is overwhelming to say the least and terrifying indeed. We give you permission to guide us back to the light if you see us glancing towards darkness.
 
May you, our community and friends as well as this truly wonderful universe guide us during this time. May we be given the strength to be honest when we are not coping, the strength to release emotions that try to bury themselves and the strength to find a new way in the world with even more love, compassion and meaning than we had before we lost our beautiful Indie. Thank you for being a part of our healing and sending your love to our family.