I was very startled tonight to read that Ben and Casey Affleck’s mom, Chris, died at 83 back on May 31st. Her sons have just announced the passing.
Like Matt Damon’s late great dad, I remember meeting Chris back in the time of “Good Will Hunting.” She was terrific. Condolences to her family and friends.
Here’s her obit, reprinted from Legacy.com. May her memory be a blessing
Born in New York City, in 1942. From the beginning of her life, Chris made her unconventional name her own, foreshadowing both the personality and the practicality that would follow her to her death. She accepted a typo in her first email address in similar fashion, making her “Chritopher” with no “s” for a solid twenty years.
Chris cherished her younger siblings. She idolized her stepfather, Sam, and took pride in his WWII service and support for civil rights. At Nightingale-Bamford, she made the most of an elite education while remaining skeptical of the tightly cloistered world it represented. When a teacher chastised her for criticizing Jim Crow, without hearing from the “other side,” she slipped down to a payphone to ask Woolworth’s whether they really did turn Black customers away. That was Chris: always willing to acknowledge that she might be wrong and never letting that uncertainty be an excuse for inaction.
Chris taught literacy classes in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, marched against the Vietnam War, and reveled in 1960s counterculture. One of the first Radcliffe women to receive a Harvard diploma, she eschewed a world of higher paying careers to spend 35 years as a public school teacher. Every student, whether just arrived from Haiti or Cambridge upper crust, was a cherished citizen of her classroom republic, equal to each other and to herself.
Her favorite young people, however, were her sons, Benjamin Géza (b.1972) and Caleb Casey (b.1975). Her five grandchildren, Indiana (2004), Violet (2005), Atticus (2008), Fin (2009), and Sam (2012), were the animating force of her last two decades. Chris was suitably proud of her descendants’ achievements, but she was delighted when they questioned, defied, or cleverly engaged authority.
She retired in 2008, to both see the world and change it. After volunteering on the Obama campaign trail, she traveled to Palestine/Israel, in 2009, and returned home as an organizer with the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine. In her beloved Truro, she was a founding board member of the Sustainable Cape project. When her granddaughter’s student activist group needed a space for trainings, she invited them to Truro and attended every single workshop herself, taking notes. Her activist spirit was woven into the robust social life she kept with friends like Tom and Betsy Bilodeau, Peg and Carl White, Peter and Nancy Garrison, Patty Collinge and Jan Egleson, and those friends’ children and grandchildren.
Given six months to live in December of 2025, she called her friend, Josh Laub, to take oral histories of his time as a principal in the South Bronx.
Her greatest wish after her diagnosis, however, was to live to see her grandson graduate high school. She did so, attending with her family on May 31, 2026. She died peacefully, in her sleep, two days later.
