New Canaan’s Jeanette Chen, with her pet dog, Sunny, has cooked and cared for many cancer patients.—Michael Catarevas photo
The expression that death is part of life could easily have been coined by New Canaan’s Jeanette Chen. A mother of four who had a successful career in finance, she has helped sick friends and strangers alike in their dire times of need, caring and cooking for cancer patients daily while asking nothing in return.
An angel in the Next Station to Heaven.
Jeanette’s life story is a happy one, epitomizing the American Dream. Her Chinese parents came to this country as immigrants, settling in Maryland. She would go to college at the University of Rochester, meeting another student there, future husband Michael Chen. Both were engineering majors who would get MBAs and have lucrative careers in finance. They’ve been married for 29 years.
Both once worked at GE Capital, with Jeanette rising to managing director. Another employee there, a woman named Francine, was part of Jeanette’s work group. She was in the beginning stages of a long struggle with breast cancer.
Upon having her fourth child in 2002, Jeanette left the company. Soon thereafter she heard that Francine’s condition was worsening. Jeanette reconnected with her and one day Francine called and asked if Jeanette could drive her to the hospital. Of course she did.
“She had no one to drive her that moment and felt comfortable enough to call me,” said Jeanette. “She had no family nearby. I dropped what I was doing and took her. After that I went with her to doctor appointments. When you’re going through something like that it’s very lonely. People don’t know what to do. Her parents were out of state and her husband was working.
“She had cancer for like eight years, in and out of the hospital. She was strong. She kept trying to go to back to work, and did. She had months when she was okay, but toward the end she was getting weaker. I would go to her house and hang out with her. People don’t want you to see them when they’re sick. One day she wanted to come visit me. She came over, dropped off a little gift and died a week later at age 39. That was her way of saying thank you and goodbye.”
Jeanette did more than keep Francine company. She cooked special meals for her, making sure they could be eaten by someone dealing with cancer and all that brings.
“I basically had to learn what to cook,” she said. “As I went along I learned the different side effects of medications, whether it’s mouth sores, having trouble chewing or swallowing, nausea, loss of appetite, a change in taste buds. You have to stay nourished going through cancer treatments. It’s a lot of work to eat for patients. It takes a lot of energy. They’re tired. Pureed soups are good. Sick people like foods they don’t have to work to eat, that go right down.”
A selfless act repeated
A couple of years later a casual acquaintance of Jeanette’s, a New Canaan woman named Thuy, was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
“She had three young girls,” recalled Jeanette. “At the time I had four young kids and my in-laws living with us. I went to cook for her and her family. Her situation was sad. She was from Vietnam, and had been a foster child. She didn’t have any real friends. When someone’s that sick, it takes a certain type of person to spend a lot of time with them. People were wondering why I was helping her. They didn’t understand you help because you want to.
“I cooked meals and carved out time for her over the nine months she was alive, and it meant so much to her. It’s been nine years since she died, also at age 39. I hadn’t seen her kids in so long, then reconnected with her oldest daughter who had just graduated from high school. We had lunch. She said her mom called me her best friend.”
Jeanette, now 54, has since aided and made meals for seven other cancer patients. She’s delighted to report that several of them are cancer-free.
Learning to cook for them has led to the creation of a website/blog: jeanetteshealthyliving.com. It is a non-stop work in progress that offers recipes, diets, healthy living advice and much more. It’s progressed from a blog to a website that has attracted more than one million followers on social media.
“Michael was the one who told me to start it six years ago,” she said. “He advised me to write about what I was doing for cancer patients, to put it out there. So I started to record my experiences and what I was making for people in cancer treatments.”
The site now has sponsors, and Jeanette is thinking about what’s next. A cookbook is a possibility.
“Cooking for cancer patients and now the website is like my second career, or calling,” she said. “My first calling was my career and being a mom.”
A cheerful person by nature, Jeanette’s experiences with death and dying have given her a deep appreciation for life.
“You get attached to people you’re helping… you dive in and then they die and it’s hard,” she said. “Really hard. We’re not alive just to have a good time. Life wasn’t meant to be easy. It’s the way you look at things. We have so much to be grateful for. I used to try and plan into the future. But you see people die young and realize you need to just enjoy every day, because you don’t know. So I try to live each day with purpose.”
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