‘Pray for your father’: Dad’s heartbreak as son dies from pancreatic cancer
By BRIAN JONES In the aftermath of his son’s death in 2016, Peter Molan was devastated.
“It was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever experienced,” he says.
“I’m trying to think of all the other things I’ve done for my son.
It was all very hard.”
The 24-year-old was a single dad, living alone and raising two young children with his girlfriend, whom he had met on Tinder.
His youngest son, Luke, was five years old when he died.
“The hardest thing I have ever had to do was to tell my son that my life is over,” Molan says.
A few weeks after Luke’s death, he decided to try something different, and started a Facebook page called PRAY FOR YOUR DAD.
His friends and followers rallied around the campaign, urging Molan to take his life.
“My life is all I have.
I’m just trying to find the strength to give up, because there’s no reason I can’t,” he recalls.
The Facebook page had attracted over 2.6 million likes by the end of the year.
Molan’s father Peter, who was a teacher, and mother Laura, a home-care assistant, were devastated by his death.
“We were both devastated.
It’s so hard to accept that something like this could happen to anybody,” he said.
A week after Luke died, Molan found out that his son had gone to the hospital for an emergency procedure.
“Luke had a very bad tumour on his pancreas.
It wasn’t that I knew that it was cancer.
It just happened to be the way he had it,” he told ABC News.
“There’s no doubt that my son was diagnosed with pancreatic adenocarcinoma, and that’s when I knew it was time to do something about it.”
His Facebook page quickly became a forum for support for other families struggling with cancer.
Mola, a father of two, was one of the first to start a page to share his grief with other grieving families.
“To see all these families that were in a similar situation, it was overwhelming,” he added.
Molta’s father, who is now a lawyer, says he was devastated when his son died.
His Facebook post went viral.
“His friends and I are all over Facebook, so we were overwhelmed with the outpouring of support.
It really touched our hearts, and made us feel so good to be able to share our stories with so many people,” he explains.
Mollies death was one more tragedy in a growing list of personal tragedies that are affecting families and communities in India.
The country is ranked second on the WHO’s annual list of countries where the highest number of deaths occur due to cancer, and the number of people with cancer has doubled since 2000.
As India grapples with an epidemic of cancers such as breast, prostate and colon, there has been an alarming rise in the number and severity of cancers diagnosed in the country.
India is home to around 2.5 million cancer patients, and around 30,000 of them die each year, according to the National Cancer Control Mission.
The disease, which has killed more than 100,000 people in India, is particularly dangerous in rural areas where many families live without access to safe medical facilities.
Molaris mother, who has pancreatic disease, told ABC’s India Today that while her husband had no insurance, she was unable to get him the treatment he needed.
“Our son was an easygoing guy.
He was the best man I ever had.
He would never hurt anyone,” she said.
“When I got cancer, my husband’s family didn’t know what to do.
They said that he could only take him to a hospital, and if they didn’t give him treatment, they would be killed,” she added.
It is estimated that as many as 100,00 women in India die every year from cancer.
India’s government says the cancer epidemic has led to a rise in HIV cases, and an increase in the rate of deaths from cancer in the developing world.
In 2016, India’s cancer death rate was 10.9 per 100,068 people, an increase of 25 per cent since the previous year.
The rate of new cases increased to 17,639 in 2016.
The World Health Organisation estimates that about 80 per cent of India’s cancers are preventable, but a significant number of the patients survive and die.
MOLAN’S FACEBOOK PAGE Despite the death toll, the country’s cancer rate remains high.
In 2017, India recorded an average of 4,500 new cancer cases a day, a number that has not been seen since the 1970s, according the Indian Medical Association.
“This is not an easy statistic to track.
If you add up all the deaths and the cancers that are being diagnosed, you’re talking about more than 10,000 cases per day