Well, here we are. It's December 27, 2016, and Carrie Fisher has passed on.
There have been a lot of deaths in the entertainment industry and also deaths of historical figures such as John Glenn this year. I mean, a lot. It seemed like the year was just hyper-saturated with these people, who have by-and-large enriched our lives, leaving us.
Well, personally, my year kind of bookended in a way. Alan Rickman died early on in January of this year, and I am still not okay with it. I suppose I'll get better as the years go on, but I cannot quantify what that man's talent has brought to my table.
When I read the news that Carrie Fisher had been rushed to the hospital, getting off a flight, not breathing, cardiac arrest...I knew I had to prepare for the worst, but...you gotta understand.
I owned Princess Leia shoes.
I'm told that they were not the ones that Stride Rite was selling as Princess Leia shoes, but they were next to the display and I thought they should be part of it, so I said they were obviously Princess Leia's shoes and I wanted a pair. I wore those suckers through, too. Apparently they only sold boys' shoes in the Star Wars line (that's a rant for another day), but I figured Princess Leia would LOVE those shoes. I did.
The empowerment of Princess Leia, who took all my (Disney-soaked) notions of what a Princess was supposed to be (in an era way, way before Ariel started singing or Belle got plucky) and turned them unceremoniously on their ear, cannot be overstated for every single girl who got to experience Star Wars with a child's eyes in the theater, in an age far before digital--heck, in an age before the VCR was a common household appliance.
I was shocked--SHOCKED--that she was the one grabbing the blaster from Luke Skywalker (oh, how in love with Mark Hamill I was...which explains a LOT about me now) and valiantly trying to save everyone during her rescue attempt. Princesses did not do this! They waited, looked fetching, and responded demurely and appropriately, like Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. They did not call men scoundrels or scruffy-looking nerf herders (a fabulous line that I really do believe only Carrie Fisher could do that kind of justice). If they were patient and willing and demure, they got their reward.
Meanwhile, Princess Leia didn't wait for anybody to rescue her. The minute she got the chance, she helped the boys trying to rescue her by looking for an escape route, got the plans to the Rebellion, made the tough decisions. She got to fire the gun. She got to be the person in control a lot of the time.
And Carrie Fisher, as Princess Leia, freed a lot of girls from the prison of that Disney-fied idea of a Princess. In many respects, we're all in her debt for being willing to embody this character and to bring to the character that snappy dialogue that Carrie herself helped to rewrite and the chutzpah that many female characters have tried to emulate over the years.
But her portrayal of this beloved character is not the only reason that Carrie's passing devastates me.
After she hung up her Princess Leia hairdos (for a while, anyway), she went on to do other work, like being Meg Ryan's best friend Marie in When Harry Met Sally, or writing the book and then screenplay for Postcards from the Edge, a movie I recall vividly seeing in the Great Northern Mall theater, alone, as I did so often in college (and now, sadly). I remember reading (in Premiere magazine) about how this movie got to the big screen, how annoyed Penny Marshall was with Carrie for spending so much time with Meryl Streep now as Penny and Carrie had been great friends...I remember all of it.
That made Carrie Fisher a person to me, and one that I could really connect with.
Her brave sharing of what it's like to have a broken brain, however...I don't have the words right now to fully express what this sharing has done for those of us who share the broken brain problem. Clearly, Carrie had a brain that appears to have needed more heavy-duty care than mine, and I can assure you that living with mine has been no picnic. However, I suffer from Major Depressive Disorder, Type 1, with concomitant Anxiety. Yay! Despite everyone attempting to say that I was bipolar, given how buoyant I tried to be in the years around not being medicated or not being medicated properly, which I'm sure looked like I went from major ups to major downs...nope. Sorry. I just kind of am that way, which is then distorted and stretched and made all kinds of crazy by the massive depression that revolves around my neurotransmitters not getting from point A to point B properly. I am just grateful--massively, amazingly grateful--that there are classes of medications that work for me with very little depression leaking through; now when I experience depression, it's situational or driven by stress.
Carrie wasn't so lucky. She suffered from Genuine Bonafide Bipolar Type 1. As she would say, "You know, the crazy kind." She described it as getting very sad or getting very fast, which I thought was a very clever way for people to understand that her "ups" were not that happy, buoyant thing but rather this inability to slow the brain down (which accounts for her attempts to self-medicate to make the whole train in the head stop). She tried all the medications for her type of problem and they didn't work enough for her to not also self-medicate, so she started up with ECT, Electro Convulsive Therapy...or what they used to call shock treatments.
She speaks of these treatments at length in both of her autobiographical books Wishful Drinking and Shockoholic. She was never afraid to address it--or her problems with her father's philandering on her mother--or her troubles with her mother as an aging star from the studio system--or, in fact, pretty much anything. Carrie was kind of the original WYSIWYG, and I believe that talking about her problems in her clever, disarming fashion, was therapeutic for her.
I know it is for me.
And that's I guess where I land, now, in this idea that this kindred spirit, about whom I feel I understand so much and yet I've just scratched the surface...she's gone. She won't deliver more bon mots about her wonderful, difficult relationships. I won't get to share in the wisdom of her trials, her successes or failures, in navigating this complicated life that she leads. No more interesting stories about her father's last years of life, the trials of trying to be a better mother to her very beloved child, no cute jokes about Gary her dog. Her last words have already been written.
She's gone from us, and we're the poorer for it.
Rest well, our Princess, our leader, our fearless, amazing, wonderfully flawed Carrie. Thank you for being willing to be a mirror into the landscape of our lives, to reflect on your own, and for being just so brilliant with a phrase. I pray that I get to see you again, someday.
