#kalen

A Eulogy for Kalen Lei Perez (February 27, 1991 - June 1, 2017) Service held: June 24, 2017 at Cook Walden Capitol Parks, Austin TX

I want to talk to you about fear and I want to talk to you about courage - because I can't talk about Kalen without talking about the experiences that framed her life. Fear and courage are not two sides of the same coin; you can be afraid without being courageous, but you cannot be courageous without first being afraid.

And Kalen was always afraid.

She experienced the world through fear created by anxiety. What most people call 'mental illness' is commonly thought of as disorders of behavior - of thinking, feeling and reacting in the 'wrong' way. But Kalen and I always thought of mental illness as neurological conditions, of something physically wrong with that most important organ - the brain - causing someone to have disordered responses to common stimuli. To her and to me, 'mental illness' is an physical as a broken leg.

I'm not talking to you about mental illness to lecture about how awfully we think about and treat people with these conditions, but to give you an idea of who she was how she thought and why it matters. Because Kalen saw her illness the way she did she knew her brain was lying to her all the time. Her brain lied about what she should have been afraid of, why she should have been afraid and all the terrible ways she should have dealt with her fear. She was legally blind, had essential tremors and brain damage from concussions that caused never ending vertigo. Her brain lied to her about what the world looked like. About where the ground was under her feet.

She had to be unspeakably brave just to just stand up in the morning and take a few steps away from our bed. She had to summon immense courage to walk out our front door. And she did. She got out of bed. She went out our front door, even though going out your front door and stepping onto the road is a dangerous business - if she lost her step, she might never find her footing again.

She lived her life like a hero from stories. "Go back?" She would ask. "No good at all! Go sideways? Possible, but why? Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!" And so up she would get and trot along, cane in one hand and the other hand feeling the wall.

And she kept going forward, because 'little by little, one travels far.'

Kalen knew better than most what kind of terrible things can happen to people when they go out their front door or even when they stay at home. She didn't let that stop her; while the world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places, Kalen knew there is still much that is fair.

Of course, she believed this because of statistics and math. She knew her brain lied to her about the probability of those terrible things befalling her, of encountering those awful people. So she memorized statistics and did the math. Those statistics and that math told her she was more likely to be struck by lightning than it was that most of those awful things would happen to her.

She relied on that empirical proof to overcome the lies her brain told her- and she walked out our front door, talked to people and did all the things she could live a full and fulfilling life. Many of us were lucky enough to get to know her because she chose to believe facts instead of fears.

She would be laughing at me right now, with all my paraphrasing JRR Tolkien and all my comparing her to a hero - and she did love heroes and stories about heroes. She would argue - and she did love to argue - that she was a simple person living a simple life. Tolkien would, say that 'it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life' - but Kalen didn't know how to do simple, no matter how often she claimed she did. If there was a more difficult path to take, she would take it, just to see if she could. What hero could resist challenging themselves?

And how could I not make the comparison?

We met in a place called Dragon's Lair after all. She was a work study student and I was assigned to train her. She stuck with me, working even when she didn't have to, because she was determined to make her temporary job into a permanent job. It didn't take long before all the geeks (which is to say 'everyone we worked with') were calling her my Padawan - which is 'Star Wars' for protege.

I didn't know it at the time, but she was determined to change my role in her life from temporary to permanent. Much like when we adopted our first dog, she had chosen the largest, fluffiest and most pathetic creature in the room and decided to keep them. I do not have the words to say how I glad I am that she did.

I didn't make it easy for her to convince me we should be together, because I'm often too stubborn for my own good. She was sneaky about it, too, always getting me to take her to dinner to discuss things. At first, work - and later my objections to dating again at all - and eventually my objections to dating someone so much younger than me.

I couldn't understand. How could she want to be with me, when my life was a quicksand quagmire of bad decisions and absurdly impossible hopes too vague to even be ideas? But she was right about us and in what felt like no time at all, Kalen became an integral, important part of my life - the first person I wanted to see in the morning and who I wanted to talk to just before I slept. The more time I spent with her, the more my life became about us - about her - instead of about me; the more time I spent with her, the firmer the ground under my feet.

Between Kalen's courageous refusal to give up on me and some sage scolding from my mother - whom she had somehow enlisted to her cause - she and I got (officially) together soon after she got a full time position at Dragon's Lair - which she held until she literally could not work.

I am forever grateful she didn't give up on me, because she brought depth and magnitude and meaning into my life that I didn't know I needed, even when I was living the geek dream of working at comic and game store. An awesome adventure to be sure, but not one most of us can make a career of.

She could have, though. She wanted to.

And as far as I know, that job was still there, waiting for her get better. If anyone could have made it back to work after everything she'd gone through, it would be Kalen. Like every hero, she achieved things the rest of us marvel at.

That job meant a lot to her - not just because she was exceptionally good at it, but because of what she got to share with people. Kalen actively sought out joy - sought out things to be happy about, things to enjoy and things to explore - and people she wanted to keep. Every person she met knew it. Could feel it - the light she carried with her and that childlike excitement she refused to give up, that she shared with us all the time.

And that was her job. To share that joy with everyone who walked into that store.

It took heroic courage for her to do her job when her anxiety told her to be afraid of people, afraid of making a mistake - any mistake, afraid of disappointing other people - or worse, herself. Every day, she overcame her fears and did her job with exuberance. But she didn't just overcome the fear once a day when she went to work. Or a few times a day at work. Every moment of every day was a heroic choice to face and overcome her fear.

That decision to be courageous didn't stop when she couldn't work anymore. Some of you know that last November, she had her first seizure and spent a few weeks in the hospital. Soon after she got home, we had to let our first dog - a Great Pyrenees named Odin - cross the rainbow bridge. We still had our dog Patch, but one dog was not enough dogs for Kalen and she was worried Patch would be lonely once she got back to work and wouldn't be at home all the time. So, we looked for a new dog and found Texas Great Pyrenees Rescue. We went to one event - less than a month after she got out of the hospital - and before we left, Kalen had decided she wanted to foster rescue dogs. So, we fostered rescue dogs. Not always an easy thing, but it is worth doing.

We never missed a rescue event after that. No matter how bad she felt, no matter how weak her legs were, how much her hands shook, how uncertain that ground under her feet was, no matter how loudly her brained screamed lies and fears at her - she went to every single event. Because she was going to be a voice for those hurt and scared dogs and make sure they found their people.

That was heroic, too. Because it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay - the small acts of kindness and love.

Kalen wasn't just courageous for herself - she had courage enough she could (and did) share it with the rest of us. She encouraged us to be writers, artists, dancers, actors, business owners - anything and everything we thought we wanted to do, Kalen was there to tell us to do it.

Because - why not?

That was her secret. She was always afraid, so there was no reason not to do things. Her brain told her nothing could ever go well, so there was no reason not to try to do the big, scary things. And she would be right there beside you the entire journey. Kalen never lost faith in her people, no matter how hard things got. She agreed with Tolkien - faithless are they who say farewell when the road darkens.

She gave me courage when it was time for me to leave Dragon's Lair and rebuild an old career. She gave me courage when it was finally time for me to seriously pursue being a professional writer. She gave me courage to keep working and fighting even when my own illnesses and conditions made me just want to lay down and sleep. She gave me hope as I considered a future where I could end up disabled and wracked with pain. She shared with me her joy, her excitement, her love and her life and gave me everything I never knew I wanted from a relationship.

Now, standing here without her, I've realized it's my turn to be afraid - because - because I am afraid to go forward in life without her. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to go next or what I'm supposed to do next, but I do know that I cannot go backwards, there is no reason to go sideways, so I will pick up my bag and I will keep going forward, even if I have to put one hand on the wall so I don't fall over.

I will keep going forward because she showed me how. And I will try to carry that depth, meaning and magnitude she gave me with me for the rest of my life. She would never have believed it, but she was the small person Tolkien envisioned who changed the course of my future, who showed me it was possible to do impossible things.