For Elayne, from Cliff

For Elayne Grant Archer

April 20, 1943 – April 14, 2024

My beloved wife Elayne passed away Sunday, April 14, after a brief illness. Beloved parent to Carlo Cerruti and Dana Archer-Rosenthal, she was loved as well by the children of the commune that she started in Brooklyn: Lev Fruchter, Chenda Fruchter, Daniel Radosh and Laura Radosh, along with Carlo.

Had you met Elayne at Radcliffe College in the sixties, seeing a beautiful, blond young woman, you might have concluded that she was part of the privileged elite. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She was raised in Toronto by her war widow mother, Phyllis, in circumstances so dire that her mother once begged on the street—a story that Elayne told reluctantly in her book, Crossing Troubled Waters.

Elayne’s brilliance brought her to Radcliffe on a scholarship, to a campus whose architecture she loved, and to the university that changed her life.

With the families of Norm and Rachel Fruchter, Alice Radosh and Bart Myers, Elayne built a communal life, which meant everything to her and which to our great joy has remained part of our extended family. The commune  was a political statement of the best kind, enabling women to work professionally, part-time as necessary, knowing that the communal parents would care always for the kids.

We met in late 1975, each having been married once. On a second date, we found that we have the same birthday, April 20—her late father’s birthday, as well. Gratefully, our destiny was foreordained. We married in November 1980 and spent more than 43 years in a loving, irreplaceable marriage.

Elayne was a women’s activist, in HealthRight, a college teacher at St. Peter’s (with Michelle Cahill and Jeff Armistead), an editor at the Academy for Educational Development, and more. She wrote another book, Who’s on Today?, a valuable history of the life of our Brooklyn commune. To her last days, she was working on yet another book, “You Can’t Magic It” about the changes in the language. We are working on getting a copy to you—I think you’ll hear her voice in it and enjoy it.

Elayne was prodigiously smart and learned, capable of reciting an astounding number of poems that she loved. She never did it to impress; she was incurably modest—there was just so much going on in her mind, so much she was absorbing even up to the end, when she was listening to BBC podcasts. She was brave. Although her final illness was stunningly unexpected and brief, she had endured many months of surgeries, pain, and distress. She bore those many months with dignity and grace.

Attending other people’s funerals and listening to the list of their accomplishments, Elayne  wistfully wondered what people would say about her–my dear Elayne, who never trumpeted her successes.

I hope you remember this about Elayne, as I do. She was the kindest, most thoughtful, generous person I know. If a beggar asked for a dollar, she thought of her mother and gave five. 

May her memory be a blessing to all who knew her.