Mother and daughter may they rest in peace, love and unity now.
And on this day Debbie Reynolds passed.
One day after her daughter. May they both truly rest in peace, hopefully together, in love and unity.
So many people have posted that Debbie has gone to be with her daughter, Carrie. That her heart was so broken by the sudden loss of her beloved daughter that she couldn’t bear the idea of walking this earth without her. When I first heard that she passed within a day after Carrie did, and by stroke, initially I thought it was exactly that. A mother who so loved her daughter that she didn’t want to be here without her, so much to the point that she died of a broken heart. As a mother of three girls, I can assure you that it is totally unnatural to outlive your children. Mothers are not supposed to bury their children. This is a also a medical phenomenon not uncommon with couples who have spent many, many years married. In fact I had a friend who’s grandparents had been married for 52 years, and when her grandmother passed, the doctor pulled the family together, sat them down and said; “Do not be surprised if your grandfather, who even though he is in good health, dies suddenly, quite literally of a broken heart.”
The family, still in mourning took what the doctor told them with a grain of salt. People don’t really die of a broken heart, they thought.
Two weeks later he did just that. Died in his sleep of heart failure. Peacefully, and as the doctor had predicted. It apparently isn’t unusual for people so connected emotionally, and on a soul level to go close together. So of course I thought this was the case with Debbie and Carrie.
But then something made me go “hmmm.” I kept having flashbacks of the film Postcards from the Edge, I remember all the interviews Carrie gave about her contentious relationship with her mother. Yes there were close, but they also had quite a difficult, complicated, sometimes estranged mother, daughter bond. Which got me thinking, as the scene with Shirley MacLaine, playing Debbie, on the staircase, drink in hand, Meryl Streep, in the role of what was supposed to be Carrie, on the landing below looks up at her, is giving her shit about always stealing her thunder in every and any situation. When Meryl says; “Remember my 17th birthday party when you lifted your skirt up in front of all those people?”
Shirley says; “I did not lift my skirt…It TWIRLED UP…”
Meryl; “You weren’t wearing any underwear…”
Shirley; “Well.”
As I thought about that scene, and the feelings that Carrie had about her mother Debbie always making herself the centre of Carrie’s life, I couldn’t help but wonder, did Debbie die so close to Carrie to even eclipse her daughter in death? It might be sick and twisted, but if that was the way their relationship was when living, you just never know. Maybe Debbie didn’t even want her daughter to have the fanfare she earned at the end of her life without getting in there and making it about her?? Whatever their relationship was in the end, it is my belief that a daughter will forgive her mother absolutely anything to have a relationship with her, so hopefully their strife was long behind them and Debbie would much rather be in death with her girl than in life without her.
We will never know for sure…
Hmmm…hmmm…hmmm
