Knowing that your child is sick and dying is the the worst thing a parent could go through. Taking care of a child who is that ill takes a toll, and it’s absolutely devastating when they’re gone. For mom Lianne Roban, it was years of caring for her sick son after he was diagnosed with cancer. Sadly, he only got sicker, and he died on Easter, just days before his 14th birthday.
Due to a series of miscommunications, Roban was forced to keep her son’s dead body at home for days. Now, she’s speaking out about the emotional roller coaster she’s been on since.
It took months to get her son’s cancer diagnosed.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Lianne Roban shared that she took her son Kian to the doctor and dentist in 2019, after noticing facial swelling. It was dismissed as a tooth that was likely breaking through. But then she noticed him getting thinner and weaker. When he started falling asleep at school, she took him to the hospital. Still, her requests for testing were ignored.
Finally, a doctor agreed to test him. And they found a tumor in Kian’s cheek. “They asked me, ‘Why did it take so long for him to get to us?'” she said. “I told them, ‘I’ve been trying.'”
Kian endured months of chemotherapy.
By November 2023, Kian’s tests showed him to be cancer-free. “We thought we could finally plan a life,” she said. “We thought we were free.”
Sadly, in March 2024, doctors learned Kian’s cancer had returned. This time in the form of a large, aggressive brain tumor. Doctors were unable to remove the tumor, so Kian went into palliative care.
“He said that he hadn’t lived, and he hadn’t found love and he wanted to have children and all these things that he wanted. And he cried in my arms, I remember, for most of the day,” Roban recalled.
Kian was in hospice, but as he got sicker, his mom brought him home for care.
Knowing that her son had little time left, Lianne Roban became his primary caregiver at home. She and her mother were by his side when he died on Easter in their home.
“I never wanted him to be scared,” she said. “We held his hand and told him it was OK.”
That’s when the nightmare began.
According to Roban, the hospice in charge of Kian’s care told her that funeral directors don’t work on holidays. As a result, she kept her son’s body in her home for days after he died. She put a sheet over his decomposing body to keep away the flies, and used fans borrowed from neighbors to keep it cool. As it turned out, the hospice was misinformed.
“It was absolutely traumatizing,” she explained. “Every time I went into his room, his eyes were open and I just felt so scared.”
And even though Kian’s body has finally been moved to a funeral home, he has yet to be buried. Because of the delay in transport, his death has not been registered, so they can’t have a funeral. Despite the funeral home trying to hurry the process, it hasn’t worked.
“It’s ridiculous — he’s just lying there, my beautiful boy. There’s so much red tape getting in the way and the only person this is hurting is Kian.”
Lianne Roban has a GoFundMe to raise money to give her son a proper funeral whenever she is able.
