Francis Ruan | 14th September 2024

Is it ever justifiable to lie? I wrestled with this question one evening as I sat beside my Dayima (Auntie), her fragile frame folded into the cushions, like a petal curling at dusk. She had just been diagnosed with colon cancer. In the delicate, disquieting silence, I chose a hue seldom celebrated in the palette of morality: I chose to paint the truth white.

Why white? White is a trickster of a color—a blank slate, a fresh coat, but also a faded memory. It wears many masks: bone-white, moon-pale, chalk-dust, eggshell, snow-blind. It can gleam or it can ghost. It’s the color of untouched beginnings and inevitable endings: the blank canvas and the burial shroud, a wedding dress and a hospital gown.

A white lie promises to be gentle as snowfall—but snowflakes become slush. It disguises itself as mercy, a whisper-soft fiction, but mercy for whom? A lie told in white wraps its deception in clean lines, hoping to hide the mess beneath. White promises simplicity, but it’s a sneaky kind of simple: it erases, conceals, pretends to polish while quietly peeling away the truth.

White, we tell ourselves, is a small, sanitized falsehood—an innocent untruth. And in that moment, I told myself that this wasn’t betrayal but love. As we sat watching the last embers of daylight smear across the sky, I softened the harshness of her prognosis. "The doctors are hopeful," I said gently, painting over the cracks in her future. For a moment, I saw her shoulders release their tension, her breathing settled, as if I had added a brush of light to her dimming days. My pale lie spread quiet, comforting, and cold to the touch.

At first, the white blended into the canvas. Dayima’s spirits brightened, her eyes gleamed. The energy in her voice was infectious, each laugh a splatter of color that defied the shadows creeping on her health. In those moments, I believed my deceit had been worth it, an act of emotional alchemy that turned fear into joy. 

But white, like snow, has a way of melting under heat. My lie began to bleed—blurring lines, smudging edges, and soaking through the canvas I had so carefully created. 

Each day siphoned a bit more of her strength, until the vibrant hues of our shared world faded to something hazy, indistinct—washed-out. White. Wintry. Withered. Bleached, barren, blank, bone-dry. Every shade drained, leaving only a pale ghost of what had once been bright and bold between us.

The truth seeped in slowly, quietly, like frost creeping across a windowpane, stealing warmth from the edges first, then the center. And when the realization struck, when she grasped the full gravity of her illness, she whispered.

“Even white lies leave stains,”  there was no anger in her voice, only a sadness as soft as the petals of lily’s. Her sentence hung there, sorrow curled beneath the air, but so did a strange tenderness—understanding, bittersweet and heavy. Her words suspended between us like the last breath of twilight before night fully falls, where the pearly white disappears—inevitable, irreversible.

But I thought white lies were harmless, or was it just a blank receipt for borrowed time—a loan that the lied-to will one day pay back in disillusionment? 

When we paint a lie white, we don’t erase the truth; we frost it over, make it slick, slippery, harder to grip. White tricks the eye—it’s the color of the fox hiding in the snowbank, the polished mirror that distorts what it reflects. A white lie gives the liar a place to hide, but it leaves the person on the other end wandering through misty fog, searching for landmarks that aren’t there.

In my desperate attempt to shield her from pain, I had unwittingly stolen something more sacred: the dignity of knowing her truth, the chance to meet it head-on. I had robbed her of the power to choose how to spend the dwindling hours of light she had left.

From that frost-touched realization, I learned a white lie is not weightless—it’s a powdery residue that settles over shared moments, dulling the colors that should have been lived in full. White lies are a whiteout—a snowstorm of erasure, smothering the terrain of truth beneath a blank, blinding sheet. Alabaster, chalky, frostbitten things—blur the contours of life’s moments, smudging experiences that were never ours to alter. They are brushstrokes applied without consent, reshaping someone else’s reality in the image of our fears, insecurities, and need for control. These well-meaning falsehoods masquerade as love, yet they stain the emotional canvas with shades of confusion, betrayal, and grief—hues we never intended to introduce into the picture. We tell ourselves that white is harmless because it’s light—but it blinds. White doesn’t strike; it settles. It leaves behind pale impressions, quiet voids, the absence of something that should have been there all along: honesty.

There is beauty in honesty, even when it arrives in bruised tones—indigo truths, stormy with grief; ochre realities, stained with sanguineous regret. Truth, I’ve learned, is a palette knife, not a hammer—a tool that allows us to blend clarity with compassion. To tell the truth, even when it aches, is to give someone the freedom to paint their own picture. It’s an invitation to face both shadows and sunlight on their own terms, to mix their own pigments—no matter how pale or piercing they may be.

I once believed that white was the color of purity. Now, I know it’s not purity that makes life beautiful, but the messy, muddled mix of every hue, tinge, tone we encounter. In the end, the richest canvases embrace every shade—those gleaming with hope and those steeped in shadow. Dayima gave me more than a realization. Her gentle love taught me that kindness and integrity are not opposite shades but complementary tones. To offer truth, even when it stings, is to offer the greatest gift: the freedom to paint life’s picture in their own colors, no matter how ashen, stormy, or radiant they may be.