Marcia Tona Law LaPierre

Marcia Tona Law LaPierre, beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and incredible friend to many, passed away peacefully on Wednesday, March 11, 2026. She was surrounded by the family she loved so fiercely.

For nearly twenty years, Marcia battled stage four cancer with grace and courage that left everyone who knew her in awe. Marcia’s stubborn refusal to let illness define (or even limit) her ensured that she did not just survive — she lived life to the fullest.

Born in Los Angeles on November 18, 1963, Marcia grew up in Claremont, California, where her family settled in 1970. She attended Claremont public schools and graduated from Claremont High School in 1981, leaving her mark on nearly everything the school had to offer. Track and field, cheerleading (as head cheerleader), student government, and theater — she was involved in them all.

Marcia was, at her core, one of the most genuinely social human beings anyone had ever encountered. If there was a room, Marcia was its center, likely forging new connections or strengthening her existing ones. She went on to earn her undergraduate degree in Political Science at UCLA before attending UC Davis School of Law, where she again thrived both academically and socially.

After Davis, she passed the California Bar Exam on her first attempt and launched a distinguished legal career. First at a prominent Los Angeles firm, where she would learn lessons and make friendships that would last a lifetime, and later as inside counsel at Southern California Edison. She excelled at every turn, and characteristically, she built friendships everywhere she went that became family.

Marcia was married on June 11, 1988, at Pilgrim’s Congregational Church in Pomona — the same church where her husband’s parents had wed, and where their own daughter Tori would one day walk down the aisle. She is survived by her husband of nearly 37 years, Ron LaPierre, and their three daughters: Alexandra Shea Davies, Victoria Nicole Parker, and Veronica Erin Carlberg.

When her first daughter was born in 1992, something shifted in Marcia that surprised even those who knew her best. This brilliant, driven woman who had poured herself into her legal career looked at her child and knew exactly where she needed to be. She continued working for years — doing both, fully, the way she did everything — until she could finally come home for good in 2003. As a full-time mother, she brought the same energy, intelligence, and warmth to raising her girls and building community that she had given to every courtroom and conference room she had ever entered. In La Verne, California, where the family settled in 1997, Marcia became the kind of neighbor, school parent, and community presence that towns are lucky to have. She served as PTA President and filled every role she took on with the same combination of competence and genuine care that defined her entire life. But what set Marcia apart was not any title she held — it was the way she made people feel. She had a rare and remarkable gift for taking a circle of friends and transforming it into something that could only be called family. She did it over and over again, everywhere she went, and the communities she built still hold together today because of the love she poured into them.

Among the most treasured expressions of this gift was the extended family she and Ron grew alongside two other families, the Links and the Van der Lindes, over decades of shared life — children raised together, vacations taken together, milestones celebrated side by side, until the bonds ran so deep that the kids stopped thinking of one another as family friends and began thinking of one another simply as cousins. The three families even gave themselves a name: the LinkLaLindes. That name says everything about how Marcia moved through the world. She didn’t collect acquaintances. She grew family.

In the spring of 2006, what began as minor eye twitching during a tennis match led to the discovery of a mass and, ultimately, a diagnosis of Stage 4 Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma. Doctors gave her a twenty percent chance of living five years. Her daughters were ten, twelve, and fourteen years old. Marcia received that news and shifted immediately into fight mode. She underwent major surgery and six weeks of daily radiation treatments that same summer — all while overseeing a major home remodel and parenting three children. During the family’s annual summer vacation at Bruin Woods in Lake Arrowhead, she quietly arranged her own rides to radiation so the girls’ trip would not be interrupted. She did not want her children’s lives touched by illness until they had to be. That was Marcia: protecting everyone around her, always, even when she was the one who needed protecting.

She beat it. By every medical measure, she had won. She was declared cancer-free, told her odds of recurrence were no greater than anyone else’s, and she went back to living the full, abundant life she had always led.

The cancer returned in 2017. What followed were years of additional surgeries, further rounds of radiation, and physical challenges that tested even Marcia’s extraordinary reserves of resilience. Through it all, she never let illness become the story she told about herself or allowed others to tell. She continued to show up, to love loudly, to be present for her husband, daughters, grandchildren, father, siblings and extended family, and to be exactly who she had always been.
Even in her final chapter, her greatest concern was the people around her. She wanted them to know that the life they had built together was a blessed one — full of love, full of joy, and more than enough.

In addition to her husband and children, Marcia is also survived by five grandchildren, each one deeply adored: Parker Jo Davies and Knox Benson Davies (children of Alexandra); Nora Jo Parker and Weston Michael Parker (children of Victoria); and Drayton Aaron Carlberg (child of Veronica), who arrived just last June and carries his grandfather’s middle name as his own.

Marcia was preceded in death by her treasured mother, Norma. She is further survived by her father, Moody Law; her siblings Moni Law, Doug Law, and Marla Abrolat; a lifelong cousin by choice rather than blood, Natalie McReynolds; and by a wide and devoted community of chosen family and cherished friends whose lives she made immeasurably richer simply by being in them.

Marcia Tona LaPierre was gorgeous, brilliant, and relentlessly kind. She was a lawyer who became a mother who became the beating heart of every community she ever joined. She was the most selfless person in any room, and every room was better for having her in it. She leaves behind not just the family she was born into and the one she built, but the countless people she chose — and who, in being chosen by Marcia, became a little more themselves. The world is quieter without her. The people who loved her are not.

A celebration of Marcia’s life will be held on Sunday, June 7, 2026 at 1pm United Church of Christ, Claremont All who were impacted by Marcia are welcome to attend.

Live Life Like Marcia!