No matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.

It’s hard to believe she’s been gone for five years. In part, that’s because she isn’t gone. This is not really a Big Hero 6 “she lives in here” thing. It’s that she is all around us. She is, in her way, a pop culture saint now. Oh, she’d think that’s enormously funny. But she is the patron saint of the mentally ill, along with Robin Williams. She is the patron saint of feminism. She is the patron saint of Strong Female Characters. We pray to her, in our way, by quoting her and posting her icon. And the miracle she gives us is making us feel better about ourselves.

Yes, a lot of the way we remember her is as Leia Skywalker Organa Solo, princess, general, and senator. And, yes, there is sexualization to her memory—though it seems to me that the golden bra images are seldom the first ones that crop up. And of course that comes with the caveat of her own pointing out that she was able to kill the monster that imprisoned her, even while dressed like that. Leia kept up with the boys, and that made her a hero to young girls my age, growing up while her character was more and more developed and nuanced. No one ever suggested she shouldn’t be running around in the woods with a blaster.

But beyond that, there was Carrie Fisher the woman, and my goodness but she was fun. She was smart and snarky and took no crap from anyone. One of the moments of hers that gives me the most joy is her appearance on QI and her reaction of, “She waaaaaas?” when Alan Davies mentioned that her mother had been in Singin’ in the Rain. Like, yeah, he was telling anyone in the studio who didn’t know, I suppose, but he acted as though he was telling her, and it’s definitely information she already had.

We loved her. We love her still. IMDb has started listed script doctors on its pages, and I think that is in no small part because we all started becoming aware of the work she’d done in that field. We want to celebrate everything she did, and we can’t do that without knowing how many scripts she’d been involved in. So that is, I suppose, another miracle she’s produced. I’m not sure most people could even tell you what a script doctor does unless they know that Carrie Fisher was one, on any number of films. Though I suspect her IMDb page remains incomplete in that department.

Her final miracle is as yet unfinished. She can’t do it alone any more than Robin Williams could. However, the two of them have been fighting the stigma against mental illness and addiction as much in death as they did in life. More people are able to talk about their own problems because of their familiarity with hers. This is, after all, a woman whose ashes were in part put into a giant novelty Prozac. She wasn’t hiding her diagnosis from anyone, and that isn’t just because of her tell-all books about her life. She just talked about it. And if you didn’t like that, it surely sounded like a you problem to her. If you had a mental illness, knowing she’d have your back felt like a hug from her and still does, another miracle.

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