Billie Lourd Remembers Mother Carrie Fisher on Anniversary of Her Death

Monday was an incredibly bittersweet day for Star Wars fans, as it marked the fifth anniversary of the passing of Carrie Fisher. The actress, author, and cultural icon passed away in December of 2016 following a sudden cardiac arrest, and both fans and her costars have been keeping her spirit and impact alive in the years that have followed. Fisher’s daughter, actress Billie Lourd, recently took to Instagram to pay tribute to Fisher, with a post that features a photo of them together with a koala when Lourd was a child, as well as a lengthy caption about her experience with grief.

Lourd has previously spoken candidly about the process of mourning both Fisher and her grandmother, Debbie Reynolds, while in the public eye.

“It was brutal. It was really, really brutal, and I still hesitate and stutter because it’s really hard for me,” Lourd explained to the New Day podcast earlier this year. “Because everything I say gets turned into some headline that I didn’t mean. There’s this one where I said something, and it was like three months after she died. I didn’t know what the f*ck I was talking about or who the f*ck I was or what was going on. And I said something like, ‘Well, now that they’re gone, I get to just be Billie.’ I meant what we were talking about earlier. It’s like I got out of the shadow of them, but I didn’t want to get out of this shadow. It sounded like I like wanted them to die, and that is absolutely the opposite of what I wanted. I would do anything to get them back, but it sounded like I was excited to have the ‘Billie Show,’” she explained. “Sometimes in interviews, things get pulled out and it comes across as I didn’t care about them and that’s just not the case. They’re my favorite people in the world. I miss my mom every day and my grandma, but really, my mom the most … She was the greatest, funniest person ever. She was my best f*cking friend ever. There’s no one who will ever be as funny as she is. She was just – she is amazing.”

“When they were alive, I feel like I really tried to avoid doing things in their shadow,” Lourd continued. “We got offered all these random photoshoots and all this weird stuff that happens in my life, but I didn’t want to do them when they were alive because I wanted to make sure that people knew me separately from them.” She added, “Now I wish I could run back and do all of those photoshoots and do anything with them, really,” she explained. “But I guess I just tried to separate myself from them while they were alive and now I feel like I kind of I am kind of trying to do the opposite. I try to connect myself to them because I miss them.”