When I covered her for Celebrating the Living, I put a lot of thought into which movie I’d use for the image. The obvious, and the one I went with, was Singin’ in the Rain. But she was also, to me, always going to be Lilith Prescott Van Valen of How the West Was Won. This is the movie I most want to see on a properly big screen—a real Cinerama screen—and the movie I’ve chosen an image from today.

Some friends suggested to me today that I stop writing CtL, because this is the fourth obituary for someone I’ve covered in it. On the other hand, she was, at 84, the second-youngest person who has, shall we say, lost eligibility, and that even though I deliberately choose people who are having health problems a lot of the time. I don’t know that Debbie Reynolds necessarily had a lot of health issues before this week, but I do know that this week was harder on her than any of us, and it wasn’t easy on us, either.

Though she is most frequently being memorialized right now as “Carrie Fisher’s mother,” something I am given to understand would somewhat please Carrie Fisher as a certain amount of balancing of the scales, she still would have been worth memorializing if her most famous child had been, say, an unnoticed script doctor. She was an Oscar nominee, a fine dancer, and a notable comedic actress. Even people who didn’t realize who her daughter was have probably seen her dance with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor.

I’ll admit that many of her movies are forgettable, light ’50s and ’60s fare like The Affairs of Dobie Gillis and Tammy and the Bachelor. That’s okay; she was still good in them. Still a lot of fun. And as I said before, there’s nothing wrong with a certain amount of light entertainment. Bad movie, yes, but light movies? No. They’re valuable in their own way, and frankly, I’d rather we have a good light comedy than a bad melodrama, and I’d suggest it’s not that controversial an opinion.

Debbie Reynolds was of value. She was worth celebrating. The loss of her probably isn’t as devastating to much of anyone under the age of maybe sixty or seventy, and probably not a ton of people that old, but it’s still a loss. Even if she wasn’t doing much these days, we were still better for having her, and we will still miss her now that she’s gone.