Tonight’s special was Shepard’s pie and there was a line out the door. Hungry smiling faces of all ages made their way to the counter to fill their plates; their smiles mirrored back by the workers serving them. The place was buzzing with energy and comradery, and Jeni Wheeler was the source. Her laughter lit up the room. The line of servers efficiently doled out second and third helpings as Jeni greeted her customers by name. She ran the newly renovated kitchen and rotating crew of volunteers like a well-oiled machine. Never breaking a sweat, she fed over 75 people in two 45 minute seatings.  No, this is not the newest local hotspot. Jeni Wheeler is the executive chef and program director of Faith Family Kitchen, a ministry of the Cape Cod Council of Churches, located inside the Faith Assembly of God Church in Hyannis. Wheeler, who holds an MBA from Babson, creates and cooks her own recipes with food she obtains from a partnership with the Greater Boston Food Bank, countless hours of traveling, grant applications and public speaking engagements. And though she serves three dinners per week to families and individuals in need, it’s obvious that Wheeler is providing more than just good food. “I really feel that we nurture their soul as much as we nurture their body, and in doing so, I get more out of it than they do.”

Wheeler, 45, grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts. The oldest of three children, she described her parents as “good examples of hard work, and educations matters.” A competitive swimmer throughout her childhood, she recalls often being referred to as “driven.” As she recalled the grueling schedule of commuting to her early morning, after school and weekend swim practices, it was easy to see how she successfully handles the scheduling demands of her job at Faith Family Kitchen. She loved how it structured her world, even though it created an intense amount of pressure. The concerns over weekly weigh-ins led to a struggle with bulimia her senior year. Eventually, her hard work paid off, and she became a Division III All-American swimmer in college. “I wanted to be so much better, but I probably did just about as much with my talent as I could. I was very focused, but I never felt I was good enough.” Her dreams were cut short by an injury during her freshman year, and her swimming career was over. She described it as her “first really big struggle. I didn’t know it then, but it provided me with a lesson in loss and finding a way back. It’s the same level of commitment that I give to the kitchen, maybe for slightly different reasons, but I really think it comes from the same place. And throughout my life, I have always followed my passions, for better and worse.” She laughed. “And it comes with both!” I noticed Jeni had the unique ability to sincerely laugh while telling a difficult story, a sign of resiliency. I would soon learn, it’s her superpower.

After obtaining her MBA from Babson, she spent the next several years immersed in start-ups and running political campaigns. “I have a real attachment to local politics.” Still the determined girl of her youth, she began to steer her life in a different direction. “What led up to that was I turned forty. Single. No kids. And basically was like… ‘this was not the plan.’ I was frustrated, kind of angry… a little bit resentful. But, more than anything else, I just got to a place where I thought that if this was going to be my life, if this is it, if it’s the ‘me myself and I show’, then I need to figure out how to make the most out of it.” Through what she describes as “very random circumstances,” she was asked to teach a year of 7^th grade math in a school where over 90% of the students were below the poverty line. The challenging environment did not stop Jeni from succeeding. Don’t forget, this woman has drive. Realizing there was no curriculum after end of the year testing, she developed a personal finance segment to fill the gap. While other classrooms filled those weeks with movies and random activities, her students worked with fake checkbooks and credit, learning how to calculate debt, make payments and accrue interest. At the request of the school, she left the materials there upon her departure. Jeni had left her mark.  I smiled, envisioning that lucky group of kids. Jeni relates this story to our local technical schools. “The people going into trades are likely going to need to know about entrepreneurship. Are we teaching these kids basic business skills? Are we teaching them what it looks like to create a budget and balance your books and what you have to have to cover expenses? Or the legal components of owning a business? Are we teaching them about taxes?” I winced, as I recalled my own naïve venture into small business ownership. “Let’s be clear,” she said. “This is Cape Cod, where if you aren’t a little bit entrepreneurial, you can’t survive the landscape.” As she spoke of her continued desire to teach, I recalled those lucky 7^th graders from years ago and realized how badly our Cape students needed someone like Jeni. Actually, we all need someone like Jeni.

After teaching, she put her entrepreneurial degree to work, and it wasn’t long before “Jeni’s Joy”, a gluten-free food brand, was born. Following her joy for cooking, and inspired by her father and sister’s food allergies, she focused on successful planning. She funded the project by selling her East Boston condo in 2015. Knowing she wouldn’t pull a salary for at least a year, she carefully and conservatively crafted a budget, allotting set amounts of money for the business, to live off of and to pay her debts. “I thought I had a pretty tight plan…then I met a guy.” Ah…my favorite type of plot twist.  She fell in love with him, as well as his four daughters. And just when she thought things couldn’t get any better, “I got pregnant.” Her eyes smiled.  “I had a hard time believing it. I took five pregnancy tests.” We laughed.  “I was elated. I couldn’t imagine my life being any better. I’m building the business of my dreams, I’ve got this guy I want to spend the rest of my life with, I’ve got these four amazing young women in my life, and now I’m having a baby. All of my dreams coming true. And then, I miscarried at 13 weeks.” The smile faded, as she stared across the room. “There was no heartbeat. I became totally unglued…and I miscarried in such a horrific fashion. No one gave me a heads up as to what to expect.” I felt a pit growing in my belly as I realized what I was about to hear. “I was far enough along, I had to go through contractions.” We quietly sat in her grief. The air around us felt so heavy. She finally broke her gaze and looked me square in the eye. “I go from the highest of highs to feeling the lowest of lows. I have the guy. I have my business. I have the kids. And then I have this horrific loss, and I felt cheated. I felt like it was cruel, because I was super happy with the business, with the relationship, with the girls…and I had made my peace with not having kids. I didn’t feel like I need to live through this. I was grieving, but I had to outwardly look okay at home because the girls didn’t know that I was pregnant, so they clearly didn’t know that I’d lost the baby.” My heart ached for her, as I tried to imagine. Yet, in true Jeni fashion, she smiled. Resiliency. She described their fertility journey after the loss. “We had all the testing done. We got pregnant right away. And then I miscarried at 9 weeks.” After discovering it was chromosomal, the specialist told her, “Part of this is about how much you can endure.” Endure. I’d never heard that word associated with pregnancy. “I think you lose a part of your soul every time. There’s just no way not to. When you see that heartbeat and then you don’t, I feel like you lose a piece of yourself. So we got pregnant again. And again, we had a heartbeat. And again, I miscarried. At eight weeks.” Jeni handed me a tissue to wipe my tears.  “Nobody knew I was pregnant, so nobody knows I’m losing the babies. You start feeling like you’re living a double life. Like you have to be on…and you feel like you’re dying inside. You feel like your body’s betraying you. The whole thing felt cruel.” She sighed. “I am a good person, and those babies were so wanted.” Was “cruel” a strong enough word? “I knew that I was struggling, particularly because I couldn’t show it. I was feeling like I had this mask on and I felt like I was drowning inside.” She visited a neonatal loss therapist. “I needed to unload it, because I couldn’t at home. And the horrible thing with miscarriages, besides the fact that no one talks about them, is that no one sees it. So even if people know, you have what people view as an appropriate mourning period, and then the rest of the world goes back to normal, and you’re expected to go back to normal. And nothing in your world seems normal…it changes for you and no one else. How was anyone expecting me to be normal again? I literally felt like I lost a piece of my soul, three times over.”

We sat for a few moments, or maybe a lifetime. There were no appropriate words for me to say, so I said nothing. She finally broke the silence. “The only upside was, thank God I wasn’t pregnant when I fell.”

Six weeks after the third miscarriage, while staying at a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, her right heel fell through the floor of a bathtub, pitched her backwards, slamming her head into the wall. Her right elbow came down on the edge of the tub, dislodged the ulnar nerve and crushed the nerve underneath it. She suffered a traumatic brain injury and injured her hamstring. “Effectively, it was like I was in a train wreck.” At the same time, her kitchen opening had been delayed for weeks due to damaged equipment, leaving her frustrated and concerned. Remember, she had carefully and conservatively crafted a budget which covered typically anticipated needs for opening a business. Her business plan did not include being in a relationship, enduring the loss of multiple pregnancies or sustaining life-altering injuries. “I fell through a tub. No one can plan for that.” Jeni never got to light a burner in her new kitchen. “Jeni’s Joy” was over.

The healing journey has been a difficult road.  She has since learned of the challenges which accompany traumatic brain injuries. “There’s the inclination for people to not believe you. They could see the orthopedic injuries, but not the head injury. It changes so much of how you operate and do things. You can’t see it and you can’t hear it. But it’s very much there.”  She explained the frustration of having concussion symptoms, particularly when her brain becomes overwhelmed from noise and light components. At Faith Family Kitchen, she frequently goes out to the dining room, but quickly returns to the kitchen. “The kitchen fans are very loud, and provide a level of white noise that drown out other things.” She has a limit to the amount of “layered” noise she can tolerate.  “When different people are having conversations, and then there’s a different tone, and then something’s banging, I have a very difficult time with that sometimes. Not always…it changes all the time, which is part of what’s so difficult. What bothers me one day doesn’t necessarily bother me another. I carry earplugs with me at all times.” I recalled the bustle and noise while watching her skillfully work earlier that night. She was right. No one can see this disability. And no one saw what was coming next…but someone should have.

“No one talked about this. Ever. It never came up. I don’t know how that’s possible, from where I sit now, but it never came up. And anyone that knew what I experienced prior to falling through the tub… the three successive miscarriages… and knowing that my business, my relationship and these kids are what really effectively got me to put one foot in front of the other…then I sustain the fall. I lost my business. I had to close my kitchen. I had invested all of my savings. I lost everything.” Her relationship fell apart. “I think the attachment for him was that he was the father of the three kids I lost, but also I loved his girls. So, I’m just multiplying loss on all sides and I don’t think there would be any possible way for me to have self-diagnosed that I was depressed, having never faced anything like that before.” She now knows that a common side effect of traumatic brain injuries is depression. She was put on Gabapentin for nerve pain in her arm, not having any idea of its known side effect of suicidal ideation. “Again, no one ever mentioned this. Here I am, just trying to survive all of this loss, and not healing appropriately, and my relationship falling apart, and I knew things were not good. I don’t think I recognized just how bad things were. I felt hopeless. I don’t know that I wanted to kill myself, I just wanted it to stop. I needed it all to stop.” She let out a nervous laugh, staring at that space across the room again. “I took a handful of old pain meds, wrote a note… and that was it.” She was found unconscious.  “I have a very hard time wrapping my head around everything because it’s the furthest thing from anyone’s mind who knows me, and it’s the furthest thing from my mind, and yet it happened.”

She woke up at Lahey Clinic. “Of course, they have a right to hold me because I came in unconscious, but now I’m feeling normal again. I told them I respectfully decline!” She laughed. “They said ‘you respectfully don’t get a vote.’” I never thought I’d be laughing during someone’s suicide story, but there we were.  “I was so scared. And in addition, I was dealing with all the concussion symptoms. I have a hard time talking about it, even in therapy. Saying ‘suicide attempt’ still doesn’t come easily. I still can’t wrap my head around it.” We talked about the power of shame and sadness. “It’s hard for me to believe I could ever be there. It’s not me. The only thing that’s made me really dig to figure out a way to talk about it at all is that if this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone. Because, I think most people would describe me as glass half full, happy and upbeat. And I am.” She smiled and chuckled, exposing that amazing superpower of hers. I was grateful for it.

“I put one foot in front of the other, every day, trying to find a way not just to survive, but to thrive. I’ve met some amazing people and it’s hard for me to imagine not getting to do all of that. But, also, it feels surreal…I feel like I have memories from a previous life, but very few of the same players.  And I don’t want it to define me, but I also don’t want to allow some sort of ongoing stigma.” I realized some of the immense trauma she’d suffered might have been prevented if she had an idea it was a possibility. She was right. No one talked about these things.

Well, someone’s talking about it now.

Silver lining: “The gift that came out of it, genuinely, is Spaulding.” After the fall, her symptoms were unexplained and not improving. “I will be forever grateful that the thing I was so scared of and fighting against and freaking out over, got me the services that I desperately needed to help me with the brain injury.”  She had been transferred from Lahey to Tufts, where the head of psychiatry linked her to a physiatrist at Spaulding, along with a post-concussion support group. Learning the explanations for her symptoms was priceless. “Reading and writing have become very difficult for me. I haven’t read a book in two years. People don’t understand how frustrating that is, how maddening it is to have been a voracious reader. It’s so difficult for me. It’s not that I can’t read; it’s how my brain is interpreting what my eyes are sending it. My eyes are switching dominance, so it makes me sometimes feel like I’m moving when I’m not moving. My whole line of vision shifts, and it happens when I try to read left to right. It’s crazy. It took almost two years until I got to a neuro-optometrist to actually figure out what was happening, that I’m having tracking issues. I’m still in therapy twice a week at Spaulding. They finally gave me some hope. No one knows if it’s ever going to fully recover, but for the first time, I seem to be with a specialist who understands what is happening. It feels validating.”

Coming to terms with it all is an evolution. “I think that the constant conflict is that I am building a life and I am getting back on my feet and I have lots of really good days and I have lots of really bad moments. I’m learning to live with what happened, learning to live with the limitations of those injuries that people don’t recognize.” She paused. “And then, learning to cut myself the slack that I regularly cut everybody else. Recognizing that there’s almost no way I could have known that I was depressed or that a combination of the situation and the medication could have caused things like that. Looking back, I wish somebody had said to me ‘so the medication you’re on and head injuries tend to cause depression. And, you’re going through a lot anyway, so if you think any of these thoughts let somebody know.’ I can’t tell you how many physicians since have said ‘Well, I can’t imagine that anybody wouldn’t have felt like that at that moment going through all that.’” She rolled her eyes, smirking. “Well, why didn’t somebody clue me in? It would have been good to know before then!”

“My life as I knew it ended that day and when I woke up, an entirely different life began.” Jeni slowly started to piece together her new life. She went from teaching babysitting for the Town of Barnstable to teaching culinary skills to at risk youth through the Cape Cod Culinary Incubator. She completed the Community Leader Institute of Cape Cod (now “Leadership Cape Cod”) and was recently elected to their board by her peers. “I love it, though I don’t always love the chaos of the schedule, as it doesn’t help with healing.” Her networking led her to speak at a woman’s retreat; a speech entitled, “What happens when it all goes sideways.” She looked at me with a grin, and I could see that her drive continued to thrive inside her. It was unstoppable. “That’s how I first kind of started, in a way, on the path back to figuring out if I could tell my story, if I wanted to tell my story, if I was capable of telling my story.” Oh yes, Jeni…you are certainly capable of telling your story.

“Figuring out a way to be able to tell my story really transformed when I started at Faith, because I suffered unimaginable loss, and for the first time, I found myself feeling grateful. Even with everything that had happened, I was still able to do something. After all that time and feeling that I might never be able to recover me back, Faith Family Kitchen basically found me. I’m fond of saying that the Conways, my best friend’s parents (who brought her to the Cape), saved my life, but Faith Family Kitchen gave me my life back. And really, when you’re in such a dark place, to feel grateful and to be able to give something when you feel like you have nothing left to give, and you find a way to give something to somebody else, I think you get so much more in return. You have purpose, which in turn gives you hope. It wasn’t a hope about whether I would recover fully, or that things would go backwards or could be undone. It was an actual hope that I might find a path forward, out of the darkness, into the light, where I wasn’t just trying to survive and I might actually have found a way to thrive. People ask me how I do what I do, how I give what I give, how I connect. I think what people recognize is that it’s just so honest. It’s so heartfelt, but my answer is that I don’t feel like I can give enough, because they legitimately gave me my life back. There’s no other way for me to put it. I couldn’t do what I do without all the volunteers, because there’s still so many things I can’t do because of the injuries. My best friend recently told me that nothing is more ‘Jeni’s Joy’ than what I’m doing right now.”

I recalled the camaraderie between her and the dinner guests that evening. “I think that even though many of them don’t know my story, the reason that I seem to be able to impact is because they know I care. And I think the reason for that is I feel like I could have been any of them. In ways, I did everything right. I have a masters from the number one entrepreneurial school in the country. I was president of the graduate evening student association. I was the National Chairperson of the 2005 National Association of Women MBA conference. I have mentored and taught and been a COO. I’ve followed my passions and I constantly take the road less traveled, and I’ve unapologetically done so my whole life. And I’ve done some interesting, crazy fun amazing things in my life…and this still happened to me. Bad things happen to good people.”

Jeni’s story isn’t over yet. “I think there’s so much to gain in talking about it. It’s like it releases a weight and it makes you feel like you’re not the only one. You aren’t the only one that thinks these things. You aren’t the only one that feels these things. You aren’t the only one that’s experienced this. And that’s both tragic and validating at the same time. It’s emotionally exhausting because you cry, but it also brings laughter and light to places that are dark. It does. It forces the light in, like little cracks, in places you feel like you might never see light again. And that’s what people showing up for people has the ability to do. So, as horrified and scared and traumatized as I am, and as much as I don’t want everything that’s happened to define me; if it helps one person talk to somebody, stick their hand out and say ‘I need help, I just need to talk,’ I don’t really think I could ask for anything more. Because God knows, I wish somebody back then had said something to me, because I don’t know how I could have seen it when I was in it. I have a hard time seeing it now.”

Jeni recently reopened Jeni’s Joy, offering catering services and prepared food with particular attention paid to food sensitivities and preferences. Life is coming full circle. As our talk neared the end, she shared one last bit of wisdom. “We all have a story, and I refuse to let what has happened harden me. That’s ‘Jeni’s Joy.’ I’m choosing a life that makes me happy and allows me to make others happy.”

Yes, Jeni. That is exactly what you are doing. Thank you.

**Update: In April, 2021, Jeni left Faith Family Kitchen to co-found and co-direct the Family Table Collaborative, a non-profit designed to help end hunger on Cape Cod and the Islands. They will soon open at the site of the former Riverway restaurant in South Yarmouth to create a community kitchen in conjunction with the Cape Cod Culinary Incubator.