Keith Morrison, Matthew Perry’s Stepfather, Opens Up About Actor’s Death

Matthew Perry‘s stepfather, Keith Morrison, is opening up about the actor’s death almost five months after the Friends actor died from the acute effects of ketamine.

The Dateline correspondent married Perry’s mother, Suzanne Perry, in 1981 and recently revealed in an interview they are still coping with the loss of the actor.

“It’s as other people have told me hundreds of times. It doesn’t go away yet,” Morrison told Hoda Kotb on her podcast Making Space. “It’s with you every day. It’s with you all the time.”

Morrison said that Perry’s death has been brutal on his wife, adding, “There’s some new aspect of it that assaults your brain, and it’s not easy, especially for his mom. I don’t think I’m giving away too much if I say that toward the end of his life, they were closer than I had seen them for decades, and texting each other constantly and him sharing things with her that most middle-aged men don’t share with their mothers.”

Before his death, and as many of Perry’s friends like Jennifer Aniston noted before, the actor was happy.

“He said so, and he hadn’t said that for a long time,” Morrison said. “It’s a source of comfort, but also, he didn’t get to have his third act, and that’s not fair. And as he said himself, ‘If I suddenly died, people would be shocked, but not too many people would be surprised.’ And he was right.”

Morrison said he “never tried to replace his dad, but I was there for him and he knew it.” Although Perry is gone, Morrison says that he can “still feel the echo of it everywhere around here.”