Debbie Reynolds asked for permission to die after the death of her daughter Carrie Fisher, the actress’ son Todd Fisher says.
“My mother said to me the night that Carrie died … we were talking that night and I didn’t know what was happening, but she was setting me up for her leaving the planet,” Fisher said in an interview with ET‘s Nancy O’Dell on Wednesday. “My mother said, ‘I know that’s tough. It might be tougher even, you know … I don’t know for sure when I [will] go.’”
“I was like, ‘Well, look, fortunately we don’t have to face that right now, you know, we just face this,’” he continued, explaining that his mother took the opportunity in the hours before her death to make sure her estate was in order.
“I thought that we were just going through these events just like one would go back through an estate,” he said. “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.”
Reynolds, the 84-year-old best known for starring in movie musical “Singin’ in the Rain,” died of a fatal stroke on Dec. 28, just one day after her 60-year-old daughter, “Star Wars” star Carrie Fisher, died from a massive heart attack.
In the interview, Fisher told ET that even though he’s made peace with the death of his mother, he’s “not so OK” with the loss of his sister.
“Carrie was in the middle of what was, I thought, her finest hours,” he said. “Her creativity was peaking, the ‘Star Wars’ thing was obviously back in spades. Everything that she was doing was turning to gold.”