The last few days have been pretty rough after watching both George Michaels and Carrie Fisher pass on. Carrie’s death hit me hard. I’m pretty damn sad about it even though I expected it. Some of my friends are in hiding from social media because of the sadness and I can’t blame them. Others are mourning hard. Others still are basically castigating us for being upset. Yes, celebrities die all the time. They died in 2015. They’ll die in 2017. We don’t really need the reminder. Some of us need to mourn and not be shamed for it.

Also I think it’s not just the celebrities we’re mourning but that lost part of our life, our past. I am now at the age where the celebrities I grew up on are getting old and passing on, taking that part of my childhood with them. When I was seeing patients about 90 percent were geriatrics and they all said the same thing; one of the hardest parts of aging was watching the icons of your childhood pass away. It slams home that you are getting older, that you have more days behind than you have before you.

So much of my childhood got whittled away this year, George and Carrie, Florence Henderson, Prince, David Bowie and so many more. But Carrie really hurts. She’s part of the reason I’m a writer now. Star Wars blew me away. She taught me women could be in charge and be smart and independent and kick ass. I started writing fan fic. Yes it was very Mary Sue. I wanted to be Luke’s sister, Han’s girlfriend and Leia’s best friend. What do you want? I was 10 and I needed to see that princesses didn’t always have to wait around helplessly and Carrie Fisher really embodied Princess Leia’s toughness.

So I will miss her. I will mourn her loss. And I will cry for even more of my childhood’s fractured memories.