One of the worst nightmares a parent can imagine is learning that one of your children has been stricken with a life-threatening illness.

And so it was for Jim and Cindy Stanley of Bangor, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jessica, was diagnosed last fall with a cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. In August, Jessica was riding the 10-speed bike she’d gotten for her birthday when she fell and rammed her right shoulder into the handlebars. When the doctor first looked at the x-rays he thought Jessica had suffered a torn rotator cuff. She went to physical therapy for a couple of months but it didn’t help. The pain just kept getting worse.

In November, Jessica wound up at Eastern Maine Medical Center for further evaluation. The doctors suspected she had cancer in her neck, and a battery of tests confirmed it: a cancerous tumor had nearly enveloped Jessica’s spinal cord and had deteriorated one of her vertebrae.

Jim Stanley didn’t know how he would break the frightening news to his daughter, but he really didn’t have to say much. Jessica saw the anguish in her father’s eyes and knew what the tests revealed.

“I could have died when I found out,” Cindy Stanley said this week. “I cried for days afterward. I had lost my mother to cancer in March of 2000, and my older sister died of cancer on Christmas that same year. So Jessica knew what cancer meant and she was scared. We cried together a lot.”

Jessica, her neck in a brace, went to the hospital every three weeks for the chemotherapy that was meant to shrink the large tumor. She then underwent a long series of radiation treatments that made her terribly sick. When she became too weak to continue going to school, her parents hired a tutor.

“It was devastating for the whole family, but Jessica always had a good attitude,” her mother said. “She was in a lot of pain but she knew she had to be strong to go through this, and she held me together at times.”

Jason, who is 17, comforted his sister in his quiet way. Because the two have always been very close, Jason found it difficult to talk openly about the ordeal his sister was going through. Like his father and brother Jimmy, who is 19, Jason preferred to keep his worries to himself.

Then in April, Jason was mowing a lawn when he started to feel a pain in his chest and a shortness of breath. He went to the hospital, where tests revealed a mass of tissue in his chest. A biopsy confirmed that Jason had non-Hodgkins lymphoblastic lymphoma, a form of cancer that would require two years of chemotherapy.

And that’s when Cindy Stanley realized that the only thing more terrifying than having one seriously ill child in the family was having two children with cancer at the same time.

Lying in bed at night, Stanley searched desperately for an explanation for what had befallen her family. Had she done something wrong to have caused this? Could it have been the well water that the family drank at their old house in Bucksport? But Stanley never did find an answer that made any sense, except that life can be damned unfair. The oncologist told the Stanleys that only once before in her 25-year-career had she known of two siblings being diagnosed with cancer in so short a span.

“I just couldn’t stop asking why, why, why was this happening to us,” Stanley said. “I still can’t believe it. There’s nothing I can do to stop this, and there’s nothing my husband can do. All we can do is sit back and watch our children being very sick and wonder why.”

The months since Jessica’s diagnosis have exhausted Stanley, physically and emotionally. When the kids have their chemotherapy and radiation treatments at the same time, mom sleeps on a cot in the hospital room. Stanley had to leave her job at Sam’s Club recently to tend to her children full time. Her husband was disabled in a work-related accident years ago and now suffers from a spine-weakening disease. The family lives on Social Security while MaineCare is paying the hospital bills.

Meanwhile, the good news for the Stanleys is tempered with the bad. Jessica has made great progress over the months. Her treatments, which should end in September, have shrunken the tumor on her spine, leaving only scar tissue. She no longer has to wear the neck brace. She can’t wait to start her freshman year at Bangor High School, although she’s afraid the other kids might make fun of her because she has no hair. Her mother has told her not to worry about small things like that.

Jason, on the other hand, has not been as fortunate as his sister. The chemotherapy has had little effect on the tumor growing in his chest, so his doctors are going to try different chemicals that will wind up killing his bone marrow as it attacks the tumor.

And all Stanley can do now is pray for her children and take hope wherever she can find it. She is grateful for all the encouragement she has gotten from friends and for the support of her loving family members. Stanley’s sister, Sheila Rines, will hold a yard sale at her house in Corinth on Sept. 13 to raise money for the family, and is hoping to find people who want to donate items or money to the cause.

“People ask me all the time how I can stay so strong,” Stanley said. “They ask me where I find my strength to get through all this. I tell them that I get my strength from my kids, from seeing how much pain they’ve been through and how strong they’ve had to be to deal with it. As a parent you have no choice but to take it one day at a time, do what you have to do for your kids, and believe that it’s going to get better.”

For information about the yard sale fund-raiser, call Sheila Rines at 285-3873.