Janis Price, a Peaks Island woman who grew up in Texas in a faith-healing home, continues to share the story of her sister, who died at the age of 7 from cancer that wasn't treated. This photograph shows the sister, Nancy, left, and Janis. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer)

PEAKS ISLAND — On the last weekend of September, as she has since 2004, Janis Price placed a memorial in the Maine Sunday Telegram for her younger sister, Nancy. Nancy, who didn’t live past the age of 7, would have been 70 this year.

Price believes no obituary ever ran where they grew up in Texas and, despite her efforts, hasn’t been able to locate an autopsy report. From what Price has gathered from records, Nancy died overnight on a Saturday and was cremated that Monday. Her death certificate lists the cause as “probably malignant lymphoma.” As far as Price knows, Nancy never saw a doctor. No one in her family did.

“That Sunday morning, they woke me up and said, ‘Nancy’s gone,’ and that was it,” recalled Price, whose parents wouldn’t explain what happened.

Price was 8 years old at the time — Irish twins, her mother called them. The oldest of five siblings, the sisters did everything together: rode bikes and horses, played kickball and pick-up sticks. At a green wrought-iron table that’s now in Price’s living room on Peaks Island, they’d sit and eat mangoes with their toes curled around the bars at the base.

Eventually, though, Nancy couldn’t play anymore or go to school, either. She vomited all the time, and lumps had formed on her neck — these were the effects of not being faithful enough, she was told.

Letters from a prominent Christian Science practitioner, which Price found among her late mother’s belongings, tell Nancy that, if she truly believed God could make her neck heal, the lumps would go away.

Price thinks her mother, who grew up exposed to Christian Science, became avid about faith healing after her own sister was treated with medication for appendicitis and was never the same. In a way, she can understand her mother’s thinking. In more ways, she can’t.

Both of her parents were educated; her mother graduated from Southern Methodist University, and her father was a lawyer, which makes it harder for Price to fathom how he could go along with it.

The church says it doesn’t prohibit its members from seeing doctors but that they often choose prayer-based healing because they have found it effective.

Price feels lucky not to have had a life-threatening illness as a child, though she remembers a badly stubbed toe that she was left to tend to herself when it started oozing and being put to bed after falling off a swing set and hitting her head.

The emotional pain of being raised this way, however, has taken its own toll.

Janis Price reads one of the many records and documents she keeps regarding the death of sister, which she has used to testify in front of the Maine State Legislature. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer) Purchase this image

Price since has become an advocate for eliminating religious exemptions to child-neglect laws and vaccine mandates, lending her support to organizations still trying to make those changes in places like Idaho, where children in faith-healing families continue to die from treatable illnesses.

In Maine, she’s told her story to legislators and written letters to the editor, as she felt compelled to do in February after the state started reporting new cases of measles.

She keeps all the public records and research she’s gathered — with her thoughts written on pink and yellow sticky notes — in a filing cabinet in the corner of her bedroom.

Underneath her bed is a box with more personal items related to her sister: sympathy notes to their mother and letters Nancy wrote herself, along with her red pencil case from school and favorite book, “The Lonely Doll Learns a Lesson.”

Portraits of Janis Price, right, and her sister, Nancy, hang in the bedroom of Price’s Peaks Island home. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer) Purchase this image

Hanging above her pillow are portraits of her and Nancy, painted by their grandmother, and beside the bed are two rocking chairs, one a little bigger than the other, where the sisters used to sit. They remind Price of how close they were.

“She was once here. She was a real person,” Price said.

PATH TO HEALING

Being on Peaks Island, where she can watch the crashing ocean waves, has been healing for Price. It took her a long time to get to this point.

Looking back on her childhood after 50 years of therapy, she can see how the effects of her sister’s death started to take hold.

Within a few months, she was wetting the bed. Streaming tears would come out of nowhere, like when her sixth-grade choir started singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” In eighth grade, when she heard another girl vomiting in the bathroom, she ran out with her hands covering her ears.

When she left home, it took a more self-destructive form — risky behavior, failed marriages, severed friendships and suicide attempts.

“It just seemed like a blinding series of one trauma or crisis after another,” Price said.

While she was living in Lexington, Kentucky, a chance encounter at a restaurant with a man from Vinalhaven led Price to visit Maine. She made return trips for years, until she ended up moving to Peaks in 1999, raising two of her daughters here and starting to find peace.

“I wanted something completely different, like nothing I’d ever seen before, and, boy, did I get it,” said Price, who gets around the island in a green golf cart.

In 2003, she held the memorial service that her sister never had, with photos and candles set up at a friend’s house overlooking the ocean. She had a band play “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and served tacos, one of Nancy’s favorite foods.

Janis Price holds a locket that contains photographs of her and her sister. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer) Purchase this image

Price has given testimony in front of the Maine State Legislature, including in 2005, for a bill that removed religious exemptions to reporting child abuse; in 2019, for one that eliminated non-medical exemptions for vaccines; and again last year, when there was an attempt to restore them.

“Nancy’s story is just, I guess, really compelling,” she said, proudly adding that the state’s vaccination rate has since risen to at least 95%.

She wants as many people as possible to know what her sister went through and what other children still do, which is why she runs the remembrance in the newspaper every year.

Price credits Nancy with saving her life, by providing an example of bravery on her darkest days.

“I don’t want her to be forgotten,” she said.

Price still plugs her ears at the sound of choking. She takes antidepressants to relieve her overwhelming sadness and help her sleep. She doesn’t talk to her other siblings, because they don’t see eye to eye on much. But she has close friends now and a longtime partner who lives in Saco and takes her on sailing trips. She’s in the island’s ukulele band, a drumming circle and the Spanish club.

Janis Price keeps her and her sister’s childhood rocking chairs next to her bed. (Derek Davis/Staff Photographer) Purchase this image

Several years ago, she moved to Windham, to be closer to her first grandchild, but started struggling and felt the need to get back to Peaks. She applied for senior housing on the island but was told it would be a long time before she’d hear anything.

One night, when she was feeling like she couldn’t go on living any longer, she thought of all that Nancy endured to help her get through it. The next day, she got a call saying an apartment had become available on the island.

She believes her sister is still thinking of her, too.