As if 2020 wasn’t already shaping up to be the worst year ever–at least in my lifetime–it was made worse on Sunday May 31, when my mother, Marilyn Stephanie Perez (née Meyers) shed this mortal coil after a three-week battle to recover from a heart attack. She was 72.
My mother was a nurturer, a caregiver, and for many friends and relatives, felt like “everyone’s mom.” She had a lot of love to give. Maybe that’s why her heart gave out. Maybe it was just tired from loving too much. She put everyone else before herself. She doted on my father. She would always make sure everyone else had food and was eating before she would sit down to feed herself. And she wouldn’t let anyone do anything she could do herself instead.
Mom was always supportive of me. Anything I was into, she was into. Guitar lessons? Sure. Making homemade comics? She brought home reams of printer paper. Get my ear pierced at 13? She took me to the mall kiosk to have it done. Tired of being a four-eyed dork (pre-geek chic)? Got me contacts. Playing Frank N Furter in the local Rocky Horror Picture Show troupe? She took me shopping for fishnets and platform shoes. Girlfriend needs to move in? Well, maybe that was one judgment call she should have made differently. But you get the point.
She got me into NBC daytime soap operas as a preschooler and I rarely missed an episode of Days of our Lives up through high school. She would pull me out of elementary school at lunchtime to take me to Burger King or KFC and buy me Cracked magazine. She drove me to the comic book shop each week to fuel my growing addiction. She saw me through a lot of bad hairstyle choices, including mullets, shaved lines, and poorly executed bleach jobs. She taught me to drive, and then let me kind of just use her car so often that it became my first car (which I paid for!).
We weren’t always as close as I wish we would have been, or should have been. Some of that was physical distance–we lived in different states, on opposite sides of the U.S., for most of my adult life. That led to a bit of “out of sight, out of mind” mental distancing as well. But in recent years, we both got (a little) better about talking (and texting) more often, and we even managed to work through some long standing emotional roadblocks as well.
Even when we grew somewhat distant due to a combination of the aforementioned actual distance and Just Life Stuff™, she still always remained my biggest cheerleader. And that’s probably an understatement. Honestly, the pedestal she put me on was sometimes unrealistically high, and I didn’t feel particularly deserving of it most times, especially given how much more I feel like I should have been there for her over the years.
She confessed to me a few months before she died, during one of our more frequently longer conversations enabled by Southern California traffic, that she felt for a long time that I didn’t think much of her. That I didn’t respect her or hold her in very high regard. She suspected it was maybe because she didn’t have the education I had, or wasn’t financially successful, or kept making decisions she thought I didn’t agree with.
All of this, of course, was so far from the truth. I told her how proud I was of her, for so many reasons–not that a reason needed to exist beyond “she’s my mother.” For how great a job she did raising my brother and myself even through years of a bad marriage and a divorce before she married my father. For her amazing ability to land on her feet despite those decisions of which she thought I disapproved. For her talent and way with people that allowed her to build an interior design and antique sales business based solely on word-of-mouth (and a few good notices in the local papers). And, of course, I expressed my gratitude at her neverending boosterism of my myriad endeavors / questionable decisions.
I didn’t get to see her immediately before she passed, but the last time we talked, the day before, the topic of the conversation was her concern for my father’s well-being. And the last text I received from her was a thank-you for taking care of him. That’s Marilyn Perez in a nutshell. An incredibly caring person who always thought of others first, even when faced with her own herculean struggles. The world is a less kind place today without her in it.
PJ, my condolences to you, your brother and Dad. I’m so glad your Mom and I had the opportunity to re-connect once she moved back to this area. I’ll never forget how we “found” each other shortly after she moved back East. We were both standing in a line to pay for curtains in a small local store. Your Mom had just paid and she looked around just as I looked up, I merely mouthed her name and she nodded. We then fell into each other’s arms. I didn’t realize how much I missed my sister until I had her back. And now once again I’ll need to learn to live with out her. Needless to say how much I’ll miss and love her.