'I heard a loud bang . . . Our lives just changed forever': Influencer mum recalls the moment her three-year-old daughter died

Eileen Loughlin’s little girl Annabel suffered severe head trauma when she was playing in the lounge at home and never recovered.

It was about 10am on a Friday morning in 2018, during a school holiday, when Eileen’s four children, including three-year-old Annabel, had friends over at their house. Speaking about what happened during an interview on Ireland AM, Eileen said: “I heard a loud bang in our sitting room. And from there, our lives just changed forever.”

Eileen went on to explain that her daughter experienced “severe trauma” to her head. The ambulance were called and when medical professionals responded Annabel was airlifted to a local children’s hospital.

The influencer, who is also a primary school teacher, recalled how around five hours later she was brought in to talk to a doctor. She said that she expected that they would tell her that her daughter was okay, but instead they informed her that the young child was going to die.

Eileen’s voice broke as she said: “She was there that morning and she was gone that evening.” She went on to say that in the seven years since she has lost her daughter her “grieving process has changed.”

“Life still keeps going, you have no choice,” she said. “And anyone going through grief will realise it’s really difficult to watch the world continue. But gradually you go from living day-to-day, and then from week-to-week, month-to-month, and then you get the opportunity to do things like this and keep their memories alive.”

Annabel’s legacy is a new children’s book called Annabel's Adventures at the Beach, which her mum created using a notebooks she wrote down memories of Annabel in, in the wake of her death.

Eileen said: “I’m a primary school teacher and I’m a mother, so I have spent hours and hours reading children’s picture books, and I love just the imagination and the creativity. I love them. So it just came to me that I would write one in memory of Annabel.”

She went on to describe the book as a “culmination of all our days out together at the beach.” The pages are filled with drawings of the entire Loughlin family, including their youngest daughter, who wasn’t yet born when Annabel died. Annabel herself is represented as a butterfly.

Commenting on the on-going grief she and her whole family feel, she added: “We talk about it, we’re open. We talk with our friends and family about Annabel, about life, about happy days, sad days.”