‘Harlan the Hero’ succumbs to 2-year cancer battle

For someone who never used social media himself, Harlan Sullins had a lot of Facebook friends.

The “Harlan the Hero” page, which chronicled the young boy’s nearly two-year struggle with cancer, has collected more than 5,000 likes since a family friend put it up the day in February 2013 that Harlan was diagnosed with an ependymoma – a rare brain tumor.

The page’s count of “likes” has jumped by almost a thousand since Saturday afternoon, when the family posted that 3-year-old Harlan had lost his fight.

“With a heavy heart, our Harlan the Hero passed away this afternoon,” Harlan’s godmother, Jamie Cooke, wrote. “We would ask for your prayers.”

Along the way, the Facebook page served as a way for the Catawba family to find a wider community that would help carry parents Jonathan and Jacki through some of the darkest times a parent can experience.

Barely old enough to be aware of the Internet, Harlan’s young life was taken up with the very real world of hospitals, chemotherapy and other grown-up medical issues. He underwent brain surgery twice and made multiple trips to the Indiana University Proton Beam Center for radiation treatments.

In the process, he lost the ability to walk, had difficulty speaking, and his family believes he even showed signs he was suffering from depression.

But the Sullins family will remember him as the happy-go-lucky little boy he should have been most of the time.

“His giggle and his laugh would just always make you smile,” said Ashley Sullins, Harlan’s aunt.

The family often depended on community support to pay for Harlan’s treatment. In April the Queen City Model A Club hosted a show of classic and contemporary cars to help raise money for the family, and Harlan himself selected the winning car.

“He was too weak to walk, so they fixed up a little wagon to pull him around,” said club president Jim Townsend. “It was a very tender thing. They’re a very sweet family, so we enjoyed being able to help them.”

The car show raised between $3,000 and $4,500, which Townsend estimated was a fraction of the expense the family had taken on to try to save their son.

“I’ve had cancer myself,” he said, “and you can’t get in the door today for $4,000.”

But after Harlan’s last CT scan on Sept. 10, Cooke said, the family knew their hero didn’t have much time left.

“We decided we were going to appreciate every day God gave us with him,” she said.

Last week, Harlan was in the news for happier reasons, after the Plum Organics food company agreed to produce 5,000 of Harlan’s favorite raspberry/oatmeal snack. Cooke credited that victory to the strength of the family’s online support.

“If we didn’t have a Facebook page, maybe somebody might have called them,” she said, “but that got thousands of people involved.”

Harlan lived long enough to see boxes of oatmeal pouches arrive at his home, just days before he died peacefully.

A funeral service will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday at West End Baptist Church in Rock Hill, followed by a graveside service at Bass-Cauthen Memorial Gardens.

The Sullins family also is maintaining a fund at Arthur State Bank, through which Cooke said the family hopes to educate more people about pediatric brain cancer.

“We’re not ready yet to say there’s a silver lining, but if there is one, it’s that this helps promote awareness,” Cooke said. “It’s not just people in St. Jude (Children’s Research Hospital) commercials. This could happen to your neighbors.”

As for the family, they face their own road to recovery after they bury their young son.

“I’m sure they’re still in shock,” Ashley Sullins said of Harlan’s parents. “For a while, it’s going to be, ‘Left foot, right foot, breathe.’ But we’re with them now, and they’re doing as well as they can.”

This story was originally published October 26, 2014 at 6:29 PM with the headline "‘Harlan the Hero’ succumbs to 2-year cancer battle."