Carrie Fisher Dead, 60: Drowned in Moonlight, Strangled By Her Own Bra

By now Carrie Fisher’s death has blown over the major news outlets. This comes at the end of a year filled with so many surprise celebrity passings. For me, this one’s a little different because Carrie Fisher was my first true love.

I was young and foolish, six years old, but aren’t first loves always like that? I saw Star Wars for the second time, and like everyone else then instantly was a fan. Lightsabers, the Millennium Falcon, Vader, the Force — awesome stuff.

The story itself was pretty simple: good guys rescue damsel in distress from evil bad guy, and then blow up the bad guy’s moon-sized battle station - you know the drill. Damsels were always in distress, of course. Even at age six I knew — in spite of a feminist mother — that women were there to be passive targets of violence, and it was the job of strong men to save them. Midway through Star Wars, however, my grasp of this basic storytelling element was thrown out the window.

There’s a scene — you probably remember — where Luke, Han, and Chewbacca have located Leia in the prison block of the Death Star. They get her out of her cell, but then the four of them are pinned down by blaster-wielding stormtroopers. None of the male characters have a clue how to get away, and things start to look grim. And then, one of the most remarkable (to my mind, anyway) moments in mainstream cinema happens. The damsel in distress grabs Luke’s blaster and clears the way for our heroes to escape: “Somebody has to save our skins.”

I was instantly head over heels with this woman at that moment. She was smart, capable, quick-witted, and sharp-tongued. Oh, and cute, too. A combination that has always attracted my fancy ever since. She took charge without apology, and in one fell swoop undermined an already deeply embodied understanding of what a woman’s role was in one young boy’s mind. Needless to say, she blew me away.

So smitten was I that later I actually, embarrassed and red-faced, spent my own birthday money in-person to buy an action figure of Leia in her Hoth cold-weather outfit from The Empire Strikes Back. Boys shouldn’t own action figures of girls, you see. It’s uncomfortably like buying a — horrors! — doll. But having that particular version of Leia was so important to me, because the figure represented everything I loved about her. She wasn’t explicitly sexy or regal; in that form Leia was matter-of-fact, practical, and capable while still remaining strongly, positively feminine. Most other heterosexually-inclined men of a certain age may drool over Leia’s slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, but for me that snowsuit defines her character.

In later years, as I grew older (well, hit puberty, anyway) and became infatuated with other women of similar cloth (Elizabeth Sladen‘s Sarah Jane Smith, Mary Tamm‘s Romana, Sigourney Weaver‘s Ellen Ripley, and — inevitably — my wife) I was saddened to learn of Ms. Fisher’s troubled past and ongoing struggles. It seemed toward the end that she began to find her center, as well as a noble calling as an advocate for people living with mental illness. Truly heroic, Fisher had the strength to find help for herself, and secure the greatest victory one can claim after such a challenging life: survival. Her death now seems especially cruel, given that she appeared to finally come to terms with a lot of her personal hardships (not to mention reprising an iconic role!).

I’ll miss her deeply.