Official Cause of Death Revealed for Ben and Casey Affleck’s Mother

BOSTON — Christopher Anne “Chris” Affleck, mother of Oscar-winning actors Ben and Casey Affleck, died from cardiopulmonary arrest on June 2, 2026. Official death records obtained by Us Weekly confirm she passed away while “visiting her son’s residence” following a months-long battle with pancreatic adenocarcinoma.

Medical officials performed no autopsy. The official update comes weeks after her family announced her passing through an obituary published in the Boston Globe on July 24.

Medical Cause of Death and Final Days

Doctors gave the 83-year-old matriarch “six months to live in December of 2025,” according to the Affleck family. Her primary cause of death was listed as cardiopulmonary arrest, with pancreatic cancer noted as a major underlying condition.

Despite her illness, she reached her final personal goal. 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,” before she “died peacefully, in her sleep, two days later.”

Affleck spent nearly 40 years as a dedicated public schoolteacher, but her life’s work extended far beyond the classroom. She maintained a long history of civil rights advocacy and political activism.

During her early life, “Chris taught literacy classes in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, marched against the Vietnam War, and reveled in 1960s counterculture,” her family wrote.

Her passion for grassroots causes continued throughout her senior years. “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,” the family statement noted. “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.”

While proud of her famous sons, family members said her five grandchildren—Indiana, Violet, Atticus, Fin, and Sam—served as “the animating force of her last two decades.” Her family noted that she was “favorite young people” were her children and grandchildren, adding that she “was suitably proud of her descendants’ achievements, but she was delighted when they questioned, defied, or cleverly engaged authority.”