Our Elena

I met Elena in the spring of 1980 when I moved in with my future husband, Ron. Ron and I rented an apartment on the second floor of an older building in the flatlands of Berkeley. Elena lived on the top floor in a quasi-collective arrangement with three roommates. She had rich mocha-brown skin, deep brown eyes, and thick shiny blue-black hair that flowed nearly to her waist in those days. In short, a thoroughly Latina beauty from head to toe. Her infectious cackly deep-bellied laugh cast a wide net.

When we first became friends, Elena worked at an organic urban farm and could answer any question about gardening, chickens, or goats that might cross your mind. I once asked her how to get rid of snails without using poison. She explained that at the urban farm she kept a “snail blender.” Every day she picked snails off leaves in the garden, put them in the blender with water, and whirled up a snail shake. She poured the snail shake around the edges of the garden beds containing the plants most vulnerable to snail munching. Snails stayed away. They apparently sensed snail death. I tried this method in my own garden and dang if it didn’t work.

Not long after we moved into our apartment, Elena moved out of the building to join a housing collective that rented a cluster of houses a few blocks away. She also left the urban farm and joined a collective of floor refinishers. She learned everything imaginable about finishing wood floors. During her floor refinishing days, when she lived in that housing collective rental (she later bought into a cooperative housing collective), I recall a mutual friend asking her at a party, “What cooperative are you in these days?” The question still makes Elena’s friends chuckle because it was such an Elena-type question. She tends to align herself with cooperative endeavors. She is the queen of the consensus and could teach even a Quaker minister a thing or two about group process.

When she lived in the housing collective rental, she had three rabbits: Lupe, Conchita, and, the male of the crew, Bugsy. Bugsy was an escape artist. Elena would release him from his hutch (“he needs a little freedom, he’s a guy”) and he would inevitably sneak out under the fence. That rabbit had nine lives. He always turned up somewhere in the neighborhood, until, in his old age, he lost his agility and became dinner for a Labrador retriever. Elena also had a fat black cat for fifteen years and then a canary named Tweetie who lived at her office until the bird’s inexplicable demise when Elena was laid off from that job. Elena said Tweetie got homesick for the office.

Elena’s parents never pursued a college education. Her mother was so smart that she graduated from high school two years early. Today that woman would have been the darling of the guidance counselors and would have had scholarships falling on her from the sky. But back then, young Chicana women were not encouraged to go to college. Elena was determined to break the family pattern of low educational attainment. She not only earned a bachelor’s, but went on to earn a master’s in English. She also studied Spanish and became fluent. Her Spanish-speaking parents, typical of their generation, didn’t teach their children Spanish because they wanted them to fit in. Elena spent many years studying Spanish and traveling in Spanish-speaking countries to learn her native language.

She had two brothers, one older and one younger. Her younger brother died of a rare disease while in his twenties. Her older brother also died young, of a heart attack. Neither one of them had children. Elena’s parents wanted grandchildren and Elena would have liked to have children when she was younger, but she didn’t want to raise a child without a partner and that opportunity didn’t come her way. She was married briefly to a German artist named Wolfy, who was wandering through the U.S. on an expired visa. She took him as her lover and married him so he wouldn’t get deported. Wolfy was funny, creative, a talented cook, and he treated Elena like a queen, the way she deserved to be treated. He appreciated her beauty and his appreciation made her glow. As a Chicana, she constantly wrestled with the negative images portrayed in the media and the culture that told her she was not beautiful. But Wolfy loved every inch of his Aztec goddess! I thought she should have stayed with Wolfy, but his lifestyle was too chaotic for her and he never had any money or ambition. As Elena worked hard doing floors and putting herself through college, Wolfy smoked weed and made jackets on his sewing machine. Eventually they parted ways, although they never divorced. Wolfy was still technically her husband when he died of an aneurysm a few years after they separated.

Elena is an example of a true political activist. While other people sign petitions online and send money to worthy causes, Elena steps into the line of fire. She once spent two months in Nicaragua building houses for single mothers and their children. The women’s brigade she went with built five houses during their stay in a small Nicaraguan village. Elena’s idea of how to spend Thanksgiving is with the Native Americans at their sunrise ceremony on Alcatraz Island. She demonstrates, advocates, and speaks out when others remain silent. In 2003, her unpoliticized childhood friend Terry was visiting her during the escalation of hostilities in Iraq. Elena wanted Terry to go into San Francisco with her to a demonstration. Terry had never demonstrated before and was hesitant. Terry had many health problems and Elena was very strict with her about what she ate whenever she visited. So Elena told Terry that she’d buy her a hamburger if she went to the demo. Terry went. Elena bought the hamburger.

Elena always seems to know which corporations and financial giants deserve our business and which don’t. She was the only person I knew who could tell when we were supposed to boycott table grapes and when we were supposed to buy them again and then when we were supposed to boycott them again. Her car is highly fuel-efficient, but she rides a bicycle everywhere to help prevent climate change. She buys clean food at local sources. No GMOs. No products from giants squashing little people in developing countries. She boycotted Monsanto before I even knew what it was.

After she earned her master’s degree, Elena taught English as a second language at the college level for a few years and then she landed a job as a counselor for teenagers who didn’t fit into the system and who spoke English as their second language. She worked at a residential high school where these misfit youngsters had the opportunity to get their lives back on track, complete their education, and have access to the extra supports they needed to be successful. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the people running the program didn’t get the memo about putting the needs of the students first. Elena struggled and struggled in that job, caught between out-of-touch, control-freak administrators and the students with whom she connected and tried so hard to help. That was the job that did in the canary when Elena finally got “laid off.”

She is an avid Lucille Ball fan, I think mostly because she admires Lucy for marrying Ricky Ricardo and she admires Ricky for his successful career during a time when Latino performers had little hope of making it in show-biz. She memorized every Lucy episode and never misses an opportunity to refer to Lucy’s antics. (Remember the candy factory? The vitameatavegamin commercial? Oh, and that imitation of Harpo?) Where other people make analogies to scenes in Shakespeare or classic films, Elena makes reference to I Love Lucy and The Three Stooges.

When our third child was born in 1991, we asked Elena to be his godmother. I had no idea how seriously Latinas take this godmother business! We had moved from Berkeley to Mendocino County by then, but the distance did not deter his godmother (or “Nina” as he calls her in Spanish). Elena looks out for our son.

For at least two years before her 50th birthday, Elena constantly reminded her friends that on her birthday she wanted us to throw a pie in her face to remind her to lighten up about aging. I thought she’d really have it coming to her on her birthday because everyone would want to “pie” her. Not so. With her parents visiting from out-of-town and her friends gathered to wish her well, no one dared take the risk of actually putting a pie in her face. Enter my family. We arrived at her birthday celebration late because of a prior family commitment. I bought ready-made graham cracker crumb crusts in pie tins and two cans of whipped cream. In the back of our car, before entering her party, we filled those crusts to the tipping point with whipped cream. Ron and our son each hid a pie shell behind their back as we entered the party. Guests could see the pies behind them, but Elena couldn’t. Ron gave Elena a huge one-armed hug in greeting, then stepped back and put the pie right in her face. Our son followed with a pie to the side of the head. Elena howled with laughter, that wonderful infectious cackle. We all howled. The pies were her favorite birthday gift.

After mopping up the whipped cream with towels I had brought, and settling into conversation, Elena told me in all seriousness, “I think we are most productive in our later years, after we turn 50. It takes us that long to figure things out and to find our voice and our calling and to become efficient at our tasks in life. We don’t fool around anymore after 50. We get things done. We know how to get things done.” She said she was just getting started at 50. The way she faced off with 50 and began to blossom continues to inspire her women friends to approach our older and elder years fearlessly, creatively, and with purpose.

On the morning of August 9, 2007, our Elena was riding her bicycle to work in Oakland when she was run over and killed instantly by a huge dump truck. The driver claims he did not see her. She was 55. On the night of her death, my husband sent a simple email to let friends and acquaintances far and wide know that we had lost our beautiful beloved Elena. It ended with the words, “My heart is broken.”

Elena was such a fully evolved human being that I sometimes think she had completed her work on this plane and so the powers of the spirit realm decided to take her to them because she had no more work to do here. She was done in the earthly world. She was needed at a higher level.

Forgive me for misleading you by slipping into the present tense while writing these words about Elena. I hoped you might fall in love with her as we did. I wanted you to love her through my voice and my words; and if you had realized from the start that you would lose her, you would have perhaps held back and avoided the pain by not allowing yourself to fall in love. Or perhaps not. For who among us truly regrets any of the minutes and hours spent with those we love, even knowing that we will lose them to death in the end?