She painted. Bright things. Explosive things. Canvases covered in color that I did not always understand but always felt. She hung them in her bedroom and in the hallway and once, without permission, on the wall of the school cafeteria, where they stayed for three days before the custodian removed them and the art teacher quietly asked the custodian to put them back.
Lily was diagnosed on a Tuesday in February of her junior year. She had been tired. We thought it was the schedule. Debate tournaments. Art submissions. Late nights studying. The ordinary exhaustion of a seventeen-year-old girl who was trying to do everything at once because the world had told her she could and she had believed it.
The blood work came back on a Tuesday. The oncologist met with us on a Thursday. Treatment began the following week.
Lily fought the way Lily did everything. Fully. Without apology. She attended classes between treatments when the doctors allowed it. She submitted debate briefs from her hospital bed. She painted during the hours when the medication made her too nauseated to read, because painting did not require her stomach to cooperate and she refused to spend any hour doing nothing.
