For Every Missing Shade

Entry 41

The next week followed the same pattern as it had since I got back. I would go to school, talk to one or two people, and then go to the hospital. Emma and I would talk, laugh, and some days we would walk around. Some days I would go over and she'd be asleep or doing tests, but it was never too hard to wait for her. Her laps around the hospital got slower and less frequent. Most of her energy was focused on staying awake and staying alive. The doctors tried more techniques from studies and experiments that were newsworthy, but none of them seemed to work too well.

Emma barely seemed interested in them anyways.

It was Friday when I went over with some takeout. I walked in and she was clearly frustrated at something.

"Hey, what's up?" I asked.

"Nothing, I just hate this stupid bed," she said plainly.

"Well, I brought some Chinese just like you asked." I held up the container and tried to get a smile out of her. Unsuccessful.

"Set it on the table, I'm not very hungry right now."

I set it down and sat next to her. "What's going on?"

"Nothing. It's just... I don't know how to explain it. It's almost like cancer is more annoying than it is scary. Like, everyone cares so much, and I love that, but no one knows what's going on or how to explain anything. And whenever I try to explain something, I never know how to do it, so no one except my doctors and nurses really know what's happening."

"Okay, well do you want to try with me?" I offered.

"No, because I don't know how to explain it. The only reason that doctors and nurses can understand what I'm going through is because they've had to see it happen hundreds of times to other people. Dying is a part of their job description, so they've gotten good at handling it."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's just annoying, ya know? All the missing shades."

"What?" I asked.

"The Missing Shade of Blue. It's this philosophy theory I heard about one time."

"What is it?"

A smile flashed across her face. "Well look who's got the obscure theories now, Mr. Time Dilation?"

"Don't glory in it," I joked as I tapped her shoulder with my hand.

"Well," she began, "David Hume, famous philosophy dude, believed that our brains can imagine something even if we haven't seen it before, and he used color to prove it. Imagine that you have a spectrum of blue shades, going from dark to light. He claimed that, even if one of the shades were missing, you could still perceive what it looks like. You could combine the shades above and below it, and semi-accurately explain the new shade. Even if you haven't ever seen that shade before."

"So, what's the missing shade here?"

"There are missing shades all over me: my diagnosis, my month to live, cancer, pain, it's all a missing shade to you. You don't know what it's like because you've never experienced it. So there are too many missing shades for you to accurately know how I feel. But the doctors have at least studied what I have. They've seen people like me before. They've had experience with hundreds of sick teenagers, and so they're much closer to being able to fathom my missing shade.

"But it sucks that no one else can. Even you can't, and you're as close to me as you could be. I mean, you should be happy to have these missing shades, but it just sucks that I constantly have to help everyone understand. Cancer, dying, and all this other stuff is my reality, and it's impossible for you to understand what that's like.