'He's on Our Minds Every Minute'

ONE YEAR AFTER THE ACTOR'S TRAGIC DEATH AT 54, HIS LOVED ONES RECALL HIS FINAL DAYS AND SHARE HOW THEY'RE CARRYING ON HIS LEGACY

- JACK SMART

Matthew Perry's Family Opens Up

In the days before his death on Oct. 28, 2023, Matthew Perry appeared to have found a kind of inner peace. “He hadn’t been the sort of person who’d call up and say, ‘Gosh, I love you, I miss you.’ But he was doing that all the time,” says Keith Morrison, Perry’s stepfather and a Dateline correspondent. “I don’t know whether he had a premonition, or he had accepted the inevitability he wasn’t going to be living as long as some people.”

Even as the Friends star, long open about his struggles with addiction, was secretly spiraling into dangerous ketamine abuse, he was also playing pickleball, attending tennis matches and having heartfelt conversations with family members. “He came up to me and said, ‘I love you so much, and I’m so happy to be with you now,’” Suzanne Morrison, Perry’s mother, recalled on the Today show on Oct. 28, the first anniversary of his death from the acute effects of ketamine at age 54. “He said, ‘I’m not frightened anymore.’ And it worried me.”

Perry had had many close calls before that tragic October day. “For years we have had to rearm ourselves repeatedly about the possibility that he would die,” Keith, 77, says of his stepson’s relapses over the years. “There were several times when the doctor would come to us and say, ‘He’s not going to survive the night, not going to survive the week.’ It was only heroic efforts by doctors that kept him alive a couple of times. And for which we were eternally grateful.” Perry was hopeful about his future but candid about what could happen. Recalls Keith: “He said to us, he said it publicly several times, ‘If I die suddenly, you may be shocked, but you probably won’t be surprised.’ He believed somehow that this particular drug that he was taking wasn’t addictive. That it wouldn’t kill him. And of course, it did.”