Solène Delinger / Photo credit: Bertrand GUAY / AFP 16:34 p.m., July 17, 2023, modified at 16:35 p.m., July 17, 2023

Jane Birkin, 76, found dead in her Paris apartment on Sunday, leaves behind two of her three daughters: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon. His first daughter, Kate Barry, died in 2013, after falling from the 4th floor of her Paris building. Let's take a look back at this drama that wiped out Jane Birkin forever.

Nothing erases the pain of losing a child. Jane Birkin is one of those parents who had to survive, to continue to move forward despite this immense pain. The singer lost her eldest daughter Kate Barry ten years ago. The photographer, the fruit of Jane Birkin's love with her first husband John Barry, fell from the fourth floor of her new home in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. His lifeless body was found at the foot of his building. No one knows if Kate Barry threw herself out of her window or if she accidentally fell. She was only 46 years old at the time of the tragedy and left behind her mother Jane, who never recovered from this tragedy.

Jane Birkin has 'hit rock bottom' after the death of her eldest daughter

"My luck was Kate, I arrived in France with Kate. I don't even remember a time when she wasn't there, that's why it's all the more disturbing to surpass her now that she's gone," Birkin said a year after the death of her eldest daughter. The singer had never suffered so much. "It's true that, when you've hit rock bottom, there is a monumental scare of the confidence you could have in life. (...) I was absolutely sure that if I was there, nothing would happen... I was sure of myself actually, as a mother, "had explained the former companion of Serge Gainsbourg whose all certainties collapsed after the disappearance of Kate.

"And then when it happened with Kate, during the eleven months, there, I didn't even cook once, I didn't have confidence in myself, to do anything, to babysit a small child... It removes any belief in oneself. Something has set in, which wasn't there before."

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After the tragedy, Jane Birkin was never the same. Part of her died with her daughter. Etienne Daho, who wrote the album Oh! Sorry you slept by Jane Birkin, witnessed her pain. It was he who tried to transcribe it, in music, in the song Cigarettes. "This question about the possibility of the accident, this stupor that we feel when we learn terrible news. I don't remember having to do anything more difficult than directing [Jane Birkin] on Cigarettes: I was overwhelmed," he said during the promotion of the album, in 2020.

At the same time, Jane Birkin had returned to the lack of her daughter, the immeasurable void that Kate has left. "Today there is a hole, an empty space. I keep her surprising nature of voice, she was such a funny girl, an extraordinary fantasy [...] He was a person of absolute gentleness. It's hard not to make him an angel. I now keep its follies, its eccentricities that I do not find elsewhere, "had described Jane Birkin. Mother and daughter are reunited today, ten years after Kate's tragic disappearance...