It’s a five-hour drive from Detroit to Chicago. Yet Lisa Rezin would make the trip just to attend a school play featuring one of her nieces and nephews. Or go to the Shedd with her grandchildren. Or the beach. Or to take her family to the theater — she bought tickets for everybody to see “West Side Story” at the Lyric Opera in June.
That’s how she rolled.
“She used to say, ‘I’m your biggest fan,’” said Dawn Baxter, her older daughter. “She made everybody feel like that. Went to every event for her nieces and nephews. She really was their biggest fan.”
Her family will have to go to “West Side Story” without her. Lisa Rezin, age 64, died Thursday from a particularly aggressive form of cancer, diagnosed in March.
Which is how she entered my world — her younger daughter, Ashlee Rezin, is an ace photographer at the Sun-Times. She asked me to help the family collect their thoughts for the obituary in the Detroit Free Press. I talked to Ashlee, Dawn and their father, Bobby, then wrote up my notes. As a creative effort, it was akin to taking three bowls of diamonds, scooping a few gems out of each and putting them in a fourth, larger bowl. It didn’t require any creativity or effort on my part to make the result sparkle.
Though as we spoke, there was something I really wanted to say, but managed to hold back. Shutting up is an art form, one that I have imperfectly mastered. One thought kept waving its hand in the back of my mind.
“You’re so lucky!”
Lucky? A strange sentiment to tell people whose mother and wife has just died, the day before, 20 or 30 years before her time. A tremendous loss. Where’s the lucky part?
She was gone way too soon. But when Lisa Rezin was there, she was there fully, completely.
Ashlee put it this way:
“If she loved you, you knew it,” she said. “When I think about my mom, the first thing that comes to mind is how fiercely she loved. There was no doubt about it. She loved hard, with fierce loyalty, and had an infectious smile and laugh.”
Family wasn’t the only thing in Lisa Rezin’s life. She never went to college and had to work — first as a waitress, where she met Bobby, her husband, a cook at the time.
She moved on to becoming a receptionist, then head of group sales at what was then the Ritz Carlton Dearborn. Until fate played a hand — one of her bosses moved to the Detroit Institute of Arts, and she pestered him, for two weeks, until he let her come along.
She called it “My museum,” and dressed in the sharp business attire she wore at her previous job. Co-workers would hear her high heels clicking across the Diego Rivera Courtyard and know she was coming.
Honestly, I could have left all this to the Free Press. But there was one thing her family told me that I tucked away for my own future use. The moment I did, it felt selfish, and I realized I had to share it with you.
Whenever somebody Lisa Rezin loved was feeling overwhelmed, or uncertain or down, she would rush over, arms outstretched.
“Come here, honey,” she’d say. “I love you with every breath in my body, every fiber of my being.”
That’s a valuable statement to keep in your back pocket. And in case, like me, it doesn’t come naturally, let me add a thought that came to me not too long ago: You can’t control how the people in the world react to anything. You can’t dictate what they say or do. You can only control yourself, what you say and do. So if a certain kind of person is missing in your life, then you don’t need to search for them, or complain about their absence, or try to force the people you know into becoming that person. Instead, you can be that person yourself. Be the person you need. Maybe others will take the hint. Maybe they won’t. But a kind and generous person will still be there, every time you look in the mirror.
Anyway, that’s how Lisa Rezin rolled, and now you can roll that way too. I don’t expect to always succeed. But I plan to always try.
