Shawn: An Almost Memoir

Chapter One: First Fight

I was frightened when my dad left me alone with my uncle at his house, because I already knew what he had to say, but I think that it was the fact that I felt like hearing it from him would only make it true. Like I couldn't just wake up and every thing would be fine, and it all would've been a dream. I recall sitting on his couch and I noticed a notebook that had Cancer in Sharpie on the front cover, but I didn't say anything, and kept trying to calm the nervous pit in my stomach, no such luck.

Shawn turned to me and asked me what I knew about cancer. I stared down at my thumbs, knowing where this was going. "I know that it can kill people," I replied. He took a drink from his pop can and set it back down on the coffee table.

"Well, that's what I have," he said. That statement, no matter how allusive and unspecific it was, that's what made it all so real for me. I was trying to hold myself together, because I thought that right then, the last thing he needed to see, was me bursting into tears. I knew that it wasn't his fault that he was sick, and I didn't want him to feel bad for something that was out of his control. He did chemo, had blood work done, because he wanted to live. My uncle wasn't a quitter...he was...is a fighter. He went months without knowing what piece of his body was killing him.

He found out that he had testocular cancer, like Patrick in The Fault In Our Stars, if you've read it. I remember crying on the phone while I told my grandma that I already knew about Shawn's cancer. She told me that I needed to be strong for Shawn. I remember her saying that she didn't want me to cry in that moment, because she wanted to be there to hug me. After we hung up, I sobbed while my stepdad held me tightly. (A.N. Shawn knows my stepdad.)

Sometime after Shawn was still suffering, and so were we. I remember being on my knees, praying to God that he would switch my fate and his, because I wanted to take his pain away, and I didn't care if it meant that I would be the one in pain. Call me crazy, but I wish that I could at least get cancer so that he didn't have to go through this alone.