Elaine Pierce, an Oak Park resident who opened her home to South American migrants last summer while coping with terminal cancer, died May 26. She was 69.
Ms. Pierce initially took in two families — six people — who’d been staying temporarily at a West Side police station.
“I only wish I could do more,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times last October.
Ms. Pierce went on to take in more migrants, all from Venezuela. Thirteen people, including three children, were living in her three-bedroom bungalow when her health worsened in recent weeks.
Ms. Pierce was an active member of First United Church of Oak Park, which is trying to find another housing solution for her housemates.
“She expressed bold and extravagant love,” fellow congregant Tara Meyer Dull said. “Elaine loved them like family. She called them her people. And they doted on her and cared for her when she was not feeling well.”
“I get kissed and hugged six times a day now,” Ms. Pierce said last year of the affection she received as her guests would head to work or to look for a job or as the kids left for school.
Ms. Pierce was a former Concordia University employee who was living alone as a retiree, surrounding herself with books and movies and the company of her daughter, when she decided to open her home.
She did so without assistance from the city or state and without asking for rent or help with utilities, covering many expenses herself.
“I went to Elaine’s house to make sure she wasn’t crazy,” said Annie Gomberg, a volunteer who helps migrants and connected Pierce with the families she took in. “I thought: Why would anybody want to do this? It’s so outside the norm of something people want to do for other people. And yet Elaine was that kind of angel — a moral exemplar for our time.”
A migrant named Claudia, 30, who has been living in Ms. Pierce’s basement with her 4-year-old son Said and her partner Jose, said she loved Ms. Pierce.
“Elaine, for me and really all of us, she was more than a friend, more like a mother,” Claudia, who asked to be identified only by her first name, said through a translator. “She was always worried about us and always looking after us. Every day, when I got home from work at a day care, we sat down and talked and shared about our lives.”
Ms. Pierce showed her guests how to access food pantries. She played Jenga and marbles with them. And she laughed a lot with the children, according to Claudia, who said she wasn’t able to say goodbye and wishes she could have given Ms. Pierce a thank-you letter she’d written.
“It said, ‘Thanks for the support you’ve given me to start over and get a job and a car and the way you provided for my family in a way I couldn’t have and for friendship and so much love,’ ” Claudia said.
She said she helped Ms. Pierce decorate her home for Christmas and that Ms. Pierce showed her how to bundle up for Chicago winters.
“I am going to keep going and continuing forward, and I want to help people like Elaine did,” Claudia said. “She was like no one I’ve met before.”
Ms. Pierce’s neighbor Jenelle Pedroza, a social worker who speaks Spanish, was among neighbors who offered to help Ms. Pierce and her new guests. Pedroza said she’d occasionally help with translation when Ms. Pierce’s usual method — using Google Translate — wasn’t enough.
The two met last spring, when Ms. Pierce, finding she had too many peaches, was sharing them with others on her block.
“Another time, my kids were in the backyard laughing, and she came over and said, ‘Do you mind if I just sit? I don’t get to hear kids’ laughter very often,’ ” Pedroza said. “And I said, ‘Sure, come on in.’ She very much enjoyed the little things in life.”
Ms. Pierce graduated from Wheaton College in 1977 having majored in literature and music. She sang in choral ensembles and led children’s music at church. She loved old movies, reading medieval mysteries and her annotated Sherlock Holmes, traveling to Italy and “all things Disney and all things Norwegian.”
The youngest of four siblings, she was born in 1954 into a Norwegian Lutheran home in rural central Iowa to Jasper and Maurine Riskedahl, according to an online death notice she wrote that her family posted.
“With an abundance of love, laughter, books and music in our home, it was a wonderful way to grow up,” she wrote.
