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 of her high school friends said to 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.
In the course of making the documentary, I interviewed Mom over a meal in order to keep things relatively casual. My crew shot from afar so she wouldn't be intimidated by the camera. "Did you ever hope that Rob or I would end up being a lawyer or a doctor or anything like that?" I asked, wondering what futures she may have envisioned for us as a parent.
"No," she responded, gently buttering a muffin, "my idea was always that you would be what you wanted to be."
Later, I wrestled with whether to include the interview of my mom in the project since I hadn't been able to be totally honest with her about the nature of the film. Mom never accepted the perception that she had a mental illness and trying to get her to see the world through the lens of others was as pointless as it was unhelpful. But in the course of editing a piece that largely highlighted many of Mom’s more difficult years, I ultimately concluded she was the best spokesperson for herself. After all her struggles, she had such generous intent for how she had wanted to parent us, and both my brother and I had indeed grown up to pursue our own individual passions as adults.
After getting the call about my mother this week, I did exactly what most people do upon news of a parent's passing—review what they meant to us over the years and try to make sense of both their life and their leaving. I dug up a book she had given to me as a high school senior when she learned that I liked to write poetry. It was Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. "When you and I were talking on the phone this past week," she wrote, "I thought about how the vision and message of Gibran's poetry ‘On Children’ has always stayed with me—even though I had read the book before you and Rob were born and didn't remember the exact words or lines."
The text of Gibran's reflection on raising children is exquisite and reads, in part:
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of the tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
I looked at the date of the inscription—November 14, 1987—and realized that I didn't have any gifts from Mom to revisit from more recent years because she hadn't had the means to give them over the last several decades. When I would bring her presents for Christmas or take her shopping during summer visits, she would always say, "What are we going to get for you?" or "But I don't have anything to give you." Often I would buy her cards that she could give me at Christmas and either me or my partner would slip them to her so she would have something to offer.
During my last visit with Mom several weeks ago, she laid in her bed studying me in preparation for an afternoon nap. "You look beautiful," she said, then she closed her eyes. In reality, I'm just a few years out from 50—far from my prime. Yet as my mom dozed, she opened her eyes once more and muttered, "You're beautiful."
My mother may not have had much to give me over these last years, but she gave everything she had—her love never wavered.
It's easy when people don't live the lives we imagined for them to lament what they didn't do. What feels more important and profound to me is celebrating what they did do.
My mom set out to be the best parent she could be. She had a clear vision for what that would look like and despite her many challenges, her aim was as true as the day I was born. All these years later, I was still her beautiful child in her eyes and always will be. Godspeed, Mom.
Me, Mom, and my brother in December 2016.
