memorials

Before Debbie Reynolds Died, She Asked Her Son for ‘Permission’ to Be With Carrie Fisher

Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Todd Fisher is still mourning the deaths of his sister Carrie Fisher and their mother Debbie Reynolds. Ahead of their joint public memorial service on Saturday, Todd shared a story of his mother’s last moments before she died of a stroke. Here’s how inseparable the mother and daughter were: Just before she died, Reynolds asked her son for “permission” to be with Carrie, he told E! After a conversation about how hard Carrie’s sudden death hit both of them, Todd recalled a shift: Debbie suddenly wanted to talk through her estate.

“I thought that we were just going through these events just like one would go back through an estate,” Todd added. “But instead the next morning, we had a little further dialogue and she chose to leave the planet in front of my face two feet away. If you had told me this story and I wasn’t there, I would have a very hard time believing what I saw. But she literally looked at me and said, ‘I want to go be with Carrie’ and closed her eyes and went to sleep.”

Todd said there’s not a medical term for what he witnessed, but that he believes it was magical. “I’m telling you what it looked like,” he told E!. “It looked like she asked permission to leave, told me she was going to leave, told me she loves me, closed her eyes and went to sleep.”

Debbie Reynolds Asked for ‘Permission’ to Go Be With Carrie