When my mother, Lynn Eleveld, passed away this week at 78, little more than a handful of folks attended her modest funeral service in Grand Rapids, MI, the place of her birth. Mom’s extended family had largely become the staff members at her group home who had given her excellent care for over a decade in the waning years of her life. It was a sweet little gathering but profoundly different from the bash we threw to mark my father’s death just last year, complete with shrimp and prime rib, beer and wine, and some 500 of the many friends he had made along his journey.
To some, the lack of fanfare for my mother might seem sad, but to me the experience of her passing was equally as meaningful, even if in a different way.
My mother lived with a debilitating mental illness most of her adult life. Prior to showing the first noticeable signs of paranoia and delusions in her early 40s, she was a woman ahead of her time. She earned both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from Michigan State University, married in 1961, and worked full time while still being the main caregiver for my older brother and me through the ’70s. Women’s liberation was certainly a concept by then, but in practice, most of Mom’s peers in Midwestern suburbia were still stay-at-home moms. She was unique in many ways—sharp witted, highly intellectual, and incredibly elegant, according to many descriptions I’ve heard over the years. A family friend once told me she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met. But although she inspired a good deal of admiration in those around her, she was also aloof. As one or her high school friends once told me, many people put her on a pedestal and she found it difficult to connect—though she certainly longed for that connection.
By the time I was around 11, Mom began having trouble. Throughout most of my teens and twenties, she was in and out of crisis units. She had as many different diagnoses over the years as she did prescription treatments coursing through her veins. She would often travel during fits of mania and we wouldn’t know where she was until a hospital or a law enforcement agency called. She turned up in places ranging from New York to Colorado to Alaska. I’m not going to lie, it was an agonizing couple of decades. She and my father divorced even before the onset of her symptoms and my brother and I lived with him until we went off to college and ventured into adulthood.
While living in San Francisco in my early thirties, I decided to make a 20-minute “short” documentary about my mother’s struggles as a thesis project for my Master’s in journalism. In preparation, I had the good fortune of spending a summer back in Grand Rapids. I saw Mom regularly during that time: 2-3 times a week and the consistency of our interactions seemed to calm her. She quit the revolving-door tour of hospitals she had been on and settled into a group home that provided a more familial atmosphere to her. Even after I returned to Berkeley, Mom mostly thrived in her new situation. As much as she always longed to live independently one day, she needed the assistance and daily interactions that the home facilitated by Hope Network offered her. Though she never let go of her dream of leaving, she clearly found her new surroundings containing.