UPDATE: Columbia musician celebrates 1 year fighting brain tumor: ‘I’m winning’

Elvie Graves has been waiting a year to throw a “Rainbow Party.”

Turning 5 years old next month, Elvie started talking about this party soon after her father, Aaron Graves, was diagnosed with a brain tumor last March. She said she wanted to throw a party when her dad’s tumor was gone.

After a year of treatment, positive thinking and tons of community support and love, the Graveses are looking forward to throwing Elvie’s much-hyped Rainbow Party in the near future, they hope.

Graves, a Columbia musician and record label-owner, was 28 when he learned he had a slow-growing tumor spread out over the motor functions of his brain. He and his wife, Jessica, spent six weeks at Duke University last summer while he underwent radiation. This month, he started his eighth out of 12 rounds of chemotherapy.

His progress has amazed his Duke doctors and given him and his family a lot of hope. Only a few small cancerous spots remain in his brain, some of which may never completely disappear, he said, and none of which appears worrisome at this point.

“As soon as we started getting good news that the radiation was working, I feel like it just started taking so much weight off,” Graves said. “And when they started talking about me as a survivor, we were just like, ‘Whoa! I’m winning! We’re winning!’”

The community reached out in a big way to support Graves and his family over the past year, from fundraisers at local businesses to gifts of checks and cards of encouragement from friends and from people they didn’t even know.

The year’s worth of love and support have reaffirmed Graves’ already strong community values and belief in in the rightness of living a life of love toward others.

“I was kind of like, man, if you tried to build a community and love all your friends as much as you can, then if something goes wrong, everybody supports each other, right? That’s how it works, right? And then it actually worked,” Graves said. “And I was never doing that (thinking), man, if I get sick someday, I need all my friends to help me out. I was just kind of like, I want to help all my friends, and I want to take care of all my friends.

“I just think you try to help everybody around you. And they took care of me when I needed it, and it just kind of reaffirmed, maybe, that that’s the right thing to do.”

Though sometimes scared by his diagnosis, Graves never felt pessimistic about his future – it’s not his nature, he said. Sometimes unsure of what would come, but never pessimistic.

Now, the mounds of progress he’s made in a year have him comfortable thinking in the long-term.

He’s started recording a second full-length album with his band, Those Lavender Whales.

He’s celebrating five years as co-owner of his record label, Fork and Spoon.

He and his wife are buying a house.

He’s planning to be around for a long time.

Graves turns 30 in July and doesn’t dread reaching the milestone.

“I think because of the last year, I’m just like, yeah, so happy to turn 30,” Graves said. “People are always like, 30, leaving your twenties behind! But I’m like, yeah, I’m glad to get older! Keep them years coming.

“The older I get, the better.”

This story was originally published April 20, 2015 at 1:49 PM with the headline "UPDATE: Columbia musician celebrates 1 year fighting brain tumor: ‘I’m winning’."