Shawn: An Almost Memoir

Intro:

I honestly don't know where to begin with this story. Perhaps giving you a little insight about why I'm writing this in the first place would help. I'm writing...because I want to get rid of the pain, and in order to make you understand it, you have to understand me, and what I am going through right now. On June 1st, 2014, I finished the book, The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green. This book gave me insight as to what my uncle has been struggling with for the past three years. His name is Shawn and he is 35 years old now.

When I was in the seventh grade, my uncle was released from prison, and no I don't know why so don't bother asking. Anyways, sometime after his release, he found out that he had cancer spread out through most of his chest, and at the age of 13, I didn't know what Stage IV cancer was until my grandma and my dad. They told me that it was the highest stage of cancer that there was, which led me to fear for him as all humans would. I mean, I had a slight of idea of what cancer was at the time, but my information was pretty limited.

I remember laying on the couch, playing my PSP when my dad told me to stop and listen to him. His voice cracked as he said, "Shawn has cancer." You think my whole world would have come crumbling down on top of me at the sound of those words, but it didn't. It's like going through the stages of grieving. I was in Denial, and then I went into Bargaining, and to be honest I haven't really hit the other ones quite yet. Three years down the line and I still haven't accepted. I mean no one accepts the fact that someone they love is going to die, I don't think it's in, what scientists like to call, human nature.

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.