“I would say that Carrie and I have finally found happiness,” Reynolds said in 2011. “I admire her strength and survival. I admire that she is alive, that she has chosen to make it. It would have been easy to give up and to give in, and to keep doing drugs…I always feel, as a mother does, that I protect her. Who will do that when I’m gone?”
But she needn’t have worried, regardless of how life eerily unfolded in the end, because Fisher had learned everything there was to know about strength and survival from her mother.
“She’s an immensely powerful woman, and I just admire my mother very much,” Fisher told NPR in November 2016, just weeks before her death. “She also annoys me sometimes when she’s mad at the nurses, but she’s an extraordinary woman. Extraordinary. There’s very few women from her generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life, and raised children, and had horrible relationships, and lost all her money, and got it back again. I mean, she’s had an amazing life, and she’s someone to admire.”
