Battling cancer through song

• By RACHEL JONES
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Jul 8, 2009

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This year about 565,650 Americans are expected to die of cancer -- more than 1,500 people a day. This is just one of the many statistics from the American Cancer Society that makes it hard to believe that just one person can do anything against a disease that ravages hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Despite the odds, Kevin Stanford has chosen to take on cancer for the one loss that meant the most – his dad.

About seven years ago, Stanford’s father, Ernest Stanford Jr., was diagnosed with prostate cancer. After extensive chemotherapy and other treatments, the disease disappeared, but returned three years later.

Stanford lost his father to cancer on March 29, 2007.

“My dad was a devoted family man. He was in the Air Force and was a retired, disabled veteran. He was a loving man and was always out to help everyone else,” Stanford said. “When he passed, we constantly heard just how good of a man he was and how many people’s lives he touched. He was just that type of man. He taught me a lot.”

Stanford had always been involved with music, so to help him cope with such a devastating loss, he wrote “With You Again,” a song in honor of his father.

“The song was just like an instant song that came to me,” Stanford said. “I wrote it and recorded it, but it was so hard for me to deal with what was going on that I actually didn’t even listen to the song for a whole year. It was that hard for me. I didn’t even let people hear it because it was just something for me.”

Even though Stanford started out making the song for himself, a friend asked him to perform it at the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life in Longview, Texas.

“The response I got from people telling me how heartfelt the song was and the affect it had on them was incredible,” Stanford said. “I decided then it was time to just go ahead and put the song out. I thought maybe it would help someone get through a similar situation.”

Stanford has put the song on his Web site, www.bewithyouagain.com, and two weeks ago it went up on iTunes, so that anybody can purchase and listen to it. Stanford decided to take a portion of the proceeds from his song and donate it to the American Cancer Society.

“My mission for this was not just to make a dollar, but to really make a change and help somebody. That’s why I decided to give a portion of the proceeds in my dad’s name back to the American Cancer Society for research,” Stanford said . “Hopefully the money that we give will help save somebody else’s life one day.”

Seeing the impact the song had on people, Stanford wanted to do something even more. He came up with the idea of making a music video for “With You Again” that would not only visually share the song, but also show all the lives being affected by cancer through pictures and video of other people’s loved ones who have passed away.

“We decided that instead of doing a full-fledged recording video we should just share this opportunity with other people who have lost someone to cancer to honor their loved one, just like I did with my dad,” Stanford said. “The idea is to take pictures and video of people who have passed and incorporate that into the music video. We will have some live footage shots and stuff like that, but I don’t want to focus on me in the video. I really want to show people how many lives are being affected.”

Stanford will start the video with a picture of his dad and at the bottom his name, location, birth year, death year, and type of cancer he died from will appear. The next slide will be a picture of Stanford and his dad together with a one-sentence phrase about what he taught him in life. Stanford’s picture says, “He taught me how to be a man.”