Craig Melvin’s older brother Lawrence Meadows dies of colon cancer

Craig Melvin is mourning the loss of his older brother Lawrence Meadows who has died of colon cancer at the age of 43.

The TODAY show anchor shared in an Instagram post on Saturday that his brother, whom he described as a “preacher of the gospel and son of God,” died. Meadows had been diagnosed with the disease in 2016 at 39 and succumbed on Wednesday.

Meadows, a Baptist minister and funeral home director, was a devoted family man. He married his childhood sweetheart, Angela, and was the father of two children, Addie, 11, and Lawson, 7.

“We lost our older brother this week. Lawrence Meadows was a husband (to Angela, his childhood sweetheart), father (to Addie, 11 and Lawson, 7) Baptist minister, entrepreneur, and one of the best human beings you would’ve ever known,” Melvin wrote in the caption. “Colon cancer robbed him and us of so much.”

“He spent a fair amount of time over the past few years raising awareness about the disease,” Craig added in his caption. “We’ll be keeping up that fight. We love you, bro.”

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Melvin went public with his brother’s struggle in 2017 who had been healthy all his life when diagnosed. He shared with TODAY viewers that a tumor the size of a baseball had to be removed from his brother’s abdomen. At the time of the surgery, doctors discovered that cancer had spread.

A year later, Melvin provided an update on his brother whom he praised as a “fighter,” who had undergone 28 chemotherapy treatments in Houston, Texas. He flew every other week from his home in South Carolina and was determined to raise awareness on the disease which is the third most common type of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.

theGrio reported in September that this form of cancer was particularly hard on the Black community who are disproportionately diagnosed and die from the disease. Black people are twice as likely to have an early onset of the disease. There is also a 17% death rate in comparison to white people.

“I think a lot of times when people hear ‘cancer,’ they think, ‘Oh gosh, well I’ve done everything I want to do, let me just go ahead and succumb to this, but no, there’s not a part of a fiber in me that says throw in the towel or give up because that’s not a part of my DNA,” Meadows said on TODAY in 2018.

Watch Meadows discuss his cancer battle on TODAY below.

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