Invisible wounds: How one veteran's family learned to live after combat

ELYRIA — Denise Weller has seen how deep the invisible scars a combat veteran brings home can be — and how they affect a family. She watched as her daughter's marriage was put to the test. In 2005, the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines lost 48 members to battle and roadside explosives during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Sgt. Jeremy Cain was lucky to survive, but returned home carrying a deep weight. He was welcomed by Weller's daughter, Megan Cain. It took a full decade for Megan to realize she needed help coping with the war at home, with Jeremy's post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. "She learned there was a way for them to get past this," Weller said. "Not for it to go away — she's never going to be free of it — but to manage it, if both parties are willing." This Veterans Day, Weller is sharing what her family has learned. She will speak about her daughter and son-in-law's long emotional journey at 11 a.m. today at Place to Recover Training and Resource Center, 2100 North Ridge Road, Elyria. P2R, as the nonprofit styles itself, helps uplift and support people coping with life's hardships — those reentering society after incarceration or recovering with substance abuse treatment, for example. Weller's background is in the arts. The Elyria resident spent 25 years with the Oberlin-based Ohio Dance Theatre, known for staging holiday productions of "The Nutcracker" for many years at Lorain County Community College. She'd periodically use dance to express her views on social issues, from drug overdoses to civil rights and domestic violence. Megan and Jeremy's story of survival channeled her energies in an unexpected direction. Today the mother-daughter duo run Hearts of Patriots, a nonprofit that aims to help spouses of veterans who live with unseen war wounds. "This was not an intentional landing for me. It's one of those life curves," Weller said. What Megan learned, and what many veterans' spouses need to understand, is that PTSD and traumatic brain injury are not a marital problem, Weller said. Veterans' families often don't treat the trauma like a medical issue, she said. They end up battling each other. Nor does the military do much to help heal the festering mental injuries veterans take home, she said. "They look like they're in one piece," Weller said. "We look like a happy family, and slowly it disintegrates. Before you know it, the marriage is a statistic." Like Megan, many military spouses "recognize in a situation like that, as a wife or a husband, that you are not the problem. The problem is the disease," Weller said. Her message on Veterans Day is that veterans' families are desperately in need of emotional support. They need communities to rally around them. Living with PTSD and other invisible side effects of war can get better, she said. But the wounds will never fully heal, Weller warned. Even though veterans' spouses and children didn't cause those injuries or deserve them, they must learn to live with them forever. With her daughter's permission, Weller turned the Cains' story into a stage production with dance at the core. Now the tale has been adapted into a documentary titled "Blood Stripe: A Spouse's Story." Like the theatrical piece, the film uses music and dance, but also incorporates video and photos, narration and interviews to tell how Megan and Jeremy's marriage has survived. The movie is complete, but has not yet had wide release. In 2020, it won Best Veteran Feature at the Freedom International Festival and the Outstanding Excellence Award at the Summer Depth of Field International Film Festival. To request a screening, visit bloodstripe.org. Weller said her hope is for the film to fuel interest in the work Hearts of Patriots is doing. The nonprofit has been awarded two $10,000 grants to assist veterans — one from the Lorain County commissioners and another from Elyria's federal American Rescue Plan funding. Hearts of Patriots already plans to run a holiday adopt-a-family program to provide gifts to veterans, their spouses and children. Weller said she also wants to use the grants to help veterans forge connections in their communities. Veterans, especially those who engaged in combat, tend to be incredibly private to the point of withdrawing from society, she said. They don't usually like crowds or loud noise, and avoid socializing. That's not healthy, Weller said. "Part of healing is learning you can't live in isolation," she said. Jason Hawk can be reached at (440) 329-7122 or news@lcnewspapers.com.