About Us

I came to Mexico in 2004, during the recession in the United States. I had been unemployed for 2 years. As one manager told me when I applied for a job, you would be very good, but in this job market we were able to find the perfect person.

I had been wanting to learn Spanish for years. My high school and college classes, along with the many years that had passed since then, were no help when it came to talking to the new Spanish-speaking immigrants that were moving into Minneapolis. And I really wanted to get to know them.

My idea was to spend one or two years in Mexico and then go back home with more job opportunities as a bilingual speaker.

But I met Gabi. I had been living in Tepotzlán for just 6 months, and had started singing in a choir. He had left the choir but returned because the director called him and told him they were going to perform the Requiem. He had always wanted to sing that.

We had so much in common: tennis, singing, salsa dancing, and I wanted to learn to translate and he was a translator. One thing led to another and four months later we were living together. That was 19 years ago.

I moved from Tepotzlán to his apartment in Mexico City where he lived with his son Armando, and a month later we found our own little apartment in Navarte. Six months later he took me for an interview at the National Institute of Health in Cuernavaca, supposedly for me to ask for work as a translator, and he ended up getting interviewed and offered a job as managing editor of their journal. We moved to Cuernavaca.

Over the years, we found Buddhism together, played tennis, held salsa rueda dance classes and hung out with friends and family. 

And he went with me to visit my mom in Florida and my dad in Minnesota. He had never been to the United States before. He was surprised by the diversity, making him feel uncertain about just which  country he was in.  But he wanted to go meet my father, to ask him formally for his permission to marry me. Though it was old-fashioned, it was sweet, and my father was impressed. We got married in 2008 in Minneapolis.

That was where he experienced his first snowfall and his first Vikings football game in person, both on the same day. He followed American football closely, since he used to play it when he was in high school. He knew all the teams, the players, their records, who beat whom and when.

As we left the stadium, it started to snow. He held out his hand and felt the flakes melting. I showed him how to catch them on his tongue. 

It turned out to be a heavy storm, and with 5 inches having fallen I asked if he wanted to go out for a walk. He asked, “Won’t we die?” I bundled him up in my dad’s sheepskin coat, a heavy scarf, gloves and hat, and we went outside. There was nothing to hear other than the soft sound of flakes falling. It was one of those beautiful moments.

By the next year when we went to visit my brother in Colorado, he had become more comfortable with the idea of snow.

We moved to Mexico City in 2015 to be near his son and daughter-in-law and the grandchildren, as well as to help get Nalandabodhi off the ground in Mexico City. Then after the big earthquake in 2017, we all came back to Cuernavaca. 

But while we were in Mexico City we started to notice things about him. We didn’t know it at the time, but they were early signs of dementia.

I used to ask him for help understanding certain sentences in the articles I was translating, but his answers didn’t make sense to me. His daughter-in-law started to notice that he would tell the same stories over and over when he took her and the granddaughter to her therapy for autism. I was frustrated. Communicating was nearly impossible. I thought it was a cultural thing, or a language thing, or a couples thing, that he just didn’t care what I was saying enough to pay attention or remember. (Read more here about early signs of his dementia.)

But since his diagnosis 4 years ago, everything changed. Though it has been a lonely four years, just the two of us in the house, and two of those being pandemic years, with no activities with others, I am grateful for this time. Within me the roots of love and compassion became strong and deep.

But this is as far as we can go together. He needs the stimulation from living with several people and group activities to slow down his decline, or at least lesson the symptoms. So a nursing home is better for him than at home alone with me. And I need  group activities as well, to connect with friends and to keep on living.

Of course our relationship isn’t ending, it keeps changing, as all things do. This is yet another change. Certainly the most difficult change we have faced, even though it is better for us both. 

His moving to a nursing home is happening much sooner than any of us expected. But with his psychologist’s help, we have found the perfect place. And we are as ready as we can be. And the date is set for September 2.

This will be challenging in many ways, including financially, which is why I am asking for your help. Any amount that you can give will be a great help. 

With love and much appreciation,

Ellen (Elena)

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