Everardo Cervantes

Everardo Hernandez Cervantes, age 79, of Norwalk, California, passed away late Monday, December 9, 2024 at Whittier Hills Healthcare Center in Whittier, California. 

A rosary will be recited 5:00 p.m. Wednesday at Aderhold Funeral Home Chapel in West, followed by visitation until 7:00 p.m. Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated 11:00 a.m. Thursday, December 19, 2024 at St. Mary's Catholic Church of the Assumption, with Rev. Timothy Vaverek as celebrant. Burial will follow at St. Mary's Cemetery in West.

His was a life of barely endurable contradiction, of poverty and immense riches, cast away and rediscovered time and again. He was a gifted musician and lover of music, from the primal tierra caliente songs of his homeland to the most sacred Eucharistic chants he sang as a choir boy in that same land. Most of all, he was a beloved Catholic son, husband, father, and brother. The loss of his earthly life will be deeply felt by those who love him but we find peace and joy in the knowledge that he is now in the arms of the one who loves perfectly, our Lord and Savior. Jesus, we trust in you.

He was born to Everardo Gonzalez Cervantes and Esperanza Hernandez Cervantes in January of 1945, despite an official birthdate of later that year. According to his mother, the meaning of Everardo’s name was “boar strength”. Named after his father, he was the second child of his parents to carry the name, the first having died in infancy. Of eight surviving siblings, he was the fifth child and the third eldest son.

Everardo was born in Los Reyes, Michoacán de Ocampo, México, the heart of tierra caliente, 15 miles from the actively erupting volcano Paricutín, which had sprung from the middle of an open field two years prior. He was raised in this land of intense beauty and equally intense violence, where the first world’s avocado trees are nurtured to abundance in rich soil and Monarch butterflies migrate perennially to their warm sanctuary, mercies hardly guaranteed one man to another. Everardo was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic faith and, despite the family’s poverty, attended the local Catholic school as a young boy purely on the devout faith of Esperanza, who prayed for him her entire life. “Como este no tengo otro… ¡No tengo otro como este!” she would lament of her son.

During Everardo’s adolescence, because of the hard work of his pioneering eldest brother Ramiro and a benefactor known in the family as Don Juanito, the family was able to begin the long process of legally and permanently immigrating to the United States, a move that led to Everardo gaining full U.S. citizenship and, he later acknowledged, surely saved his life. In his youth, Everardo lived and worked with his family in the farmland of California’s legendary Salinas Valley, working in ranching and harvesting crops such as lettuce and artichokes. Later in his life, largely because of his memories of that time and place, he developed a deep affection for the writings of John Steinbeck, particularly his epic novel East of Eden. He also was a passionate armchair scholar on the history of the Catholic Church and, perhaps paradoxically, on the lives of the Catholic saints. Music ran deep in his family’s roots. He was taught to play the guitar and sing by his grandfather and his father performed as a mariachi. His own voice, however, unsuited to that type of music, shone perfectly in poetic love songs accompanied by his own distinctive Paracho guitar. He had a rare gift in the ability to closely harmonize with the voice of anyone he sang with, uniting and uplifting both in moments of pure beauty. He was a restless traveler and compiled thousands of hours of recordings that would be coveted by today’s most distinguished ethnomusicologists. They stayed always within his grasp, though, because it was unthinkable for him to ever offer them— his treasures— up for cool dissection.

In the early 1960’s the Cervantes family purchased a home outside of Los Angeles, California, where he met next-door neighbor Denise Kathleen Beezley, who would become the love of his life. He knew very little English and she very little Spanish but they each became fluent in the other’s first language (she with the help of his older sister, Magdalena). “The time pass and the life change,” she remembers him saying after a moment of reflection in their youth. They were united in marriage at St. John of God Catholic Church on June 18, 1972 and spent many years together traveling, singing, and laughing before eventually having three children of their own. 

Everardo held different jobs in his youth, including as a foundry worker under the employ of Don Juanito, a delivery driver in Los Angeles, and as an employee of Cotter & Company, which would later acquire True Value. In the 1980’s, despite his lack of a formal education, Everardo, who also went by the name Ed (“Eddie” or “Vera” to family and friends), became a successful realtor in the Los Angeles area with Century 21.

Everardo is preceded in death by his parents; his infant son, John Philip Daniel Cervantes; and three siblings.

Survivors include his wife Denise Cervantes; daughter, Joanne Cervantes and husband Nicholas Kucera; son, Joshua Cervantes; grandchildren, Temple, Rafael, and Joseph; siblings Magdalena Cervantes, Manuel Cervantes, Martha Luna and husband Cruz, and Salvador Cervantes and wife Dr. Rosa Reynaga; and many nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to St. Mary’s Catholic School.

Please remember Everardo with this prayer, which he would sing sweetly to his daughter, Joanne, when she was very little:

Mi Jesús Sacramentado

yo te adoro y te bendigo,

porque oculto en el Sagrario

has querido estar conmigo,

has querido estar conmigo.