In her 2008 book Wishful Drinking, the inimitable author and actor Carrie Fisher wrote that she wanted her obituary to read that she “drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.” After she died in 2016, that wish was granted in many of her obituaries, a quote that encapsulated her acerbic wit and her gimlet-eyed approach to mortality, as a woman who wrote openly about her addiction and mental health issues.
But the quote wasn’t her only obit wish, as it turns out. Todd Fisher, Carrie’s brother and author of 2018’s My Girls: A Lifetime With Carrie and Debbie, told the New York Post that while going through her personal writing he recently found another note he’d never seen before. On a torn-out page from a book by British historian Adrian Tinniswood, she wrote in her flowery handwriting, “Show cancelled due to star’s booking in a more peaceful constellation.” The note, according to Todd Fisher, went on:
“‘I am dead. How are you? I’ll see you soon … I would call and tell you what this is like, but there is no reception up here.’ Then it says, ‘Cut. New scene, new setup, new heavenly location. I have finally got the part that I have been rehearsing for all my life. God gave me the part. This is the end of the road I have been touring on all my life.’”
Todd Fisher told Page Six that he was shocked he found the obituary now, so recently after seeing his sister resurrected, so to speak, on screen for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which was apparently retrofitted around old footage of Carrie in order to center Princess Leia in the story. Though Carrie Fisher initially thought that Star Wars would be “the end of my career,” according to her brother, it’s striking how both of her notes about her death invoke floating in space, the impact of a role that she loved and occasionally resented. I hope she’s floating around the universe as herself, free from the Leia braids, cracking jokes and smoking her Blu e-cig.
A previous version of this post misstated that the most recent Star Wars is The Last Jedi, when in fact it is The Rise of Skywalker. Jezebel regrets the error, which was purely Freudian given that the author is afraid to see The Rise of Skywalker.