WJBF – Ron Godfrey, an actor and an author, is remembering the life of his son, Jeremiah L. Godfrey, by helping others.

Godfrey has established the Jeremiah L. Godfrey Brain Cancer Research Foundation in order to raise money to bring awareness and to help with the research in the efforts to find a cure for this rare disease.

Ron, thank you for joining us on WJBF Digital. Can you tell us a little bit more about your son, Jeremiah, and who he was.

Jeremiah was my son, obviously, and he was 6 years old. He was a very energetic young man. He was diagnosed with a rare tumor called Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG, and it’s a rare tumor that they find in kids around 5 to 6 years old. The life span after diagnosis is normally like 6 to 11 months, and Jeremiah lasted the 11 months. Jeremiah passed away on November 1st. So, now I’m here to just let everybody know what I’ve done in his memory to keep his memory going.

What propelled you to begin the Jeremiah L. Godfrey Brain Cancer Research Foundation in Jeremiah’s honor?

What propelled me was the fact that it’s a rare tumor, and I know of other children that have passed away because of the tumor. So, what I wanted to do is help researchers find a cure because today, there is no cure – there is no known cure. So, we want to find a cure so that other parents don’t have to go through what Jeremiah’s mother and I went through.

How can people donate if they want to contribute to the foundation?

We now have a website up called the jlgresearchfoundation.org, which is the Jeremiah L. Godfrey Brain Cancer Research Foundation website, and you can go there to donate.

How can you encourage parents’ who have dealt with lost of children? What advice would give to other parents?

Well, the advice I would give parents is first of all, while they are living, love on them. If you have the unfortunate situation like I did of losing them, if you have other children, love on those children and keep that love going because that’s very important, and that will help you along the way with your healing. It’s a rough process… very rough. As days go by, it’s gets a little bit easier, but not that much and not that quick either.

If you want to donate to the Jeremiah L. Godfrey Brain Cancer Research, you can click here.