The Fault in Our Stars: Chapters 18–25

According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.

He came home from the hospital a few days later, finally and irrevocably robbed of his ambitions.

Also, if it’s not too much trouble, please prepare a eulogy.

“Hazel Grace,” he said, “you look ravishing.”

Isaac stood behind a little wooden lectern, clinging to it.

“Anyway, I know it’s a bit self- aggrandizing.”

In the last weeks, we’d been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with.

“You’ve reached the voice mail of Augustus Waters,” he said, the clarion voice I’d fallen for.

In fact, almost all the wall posts, which arrived nearly as fast as I could read them, were written by people I’d never met and whom he’d never spoken about, people who were extolling his various virtues now that he was dead, even though I knew for a fact they hadn’t seen him in months and had made no effort to visit him.

That particularly galled me, because it implied the immortality of those left behind: You will live forever in my memory, because I will live forever!

We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.

When we first got there, I sat in the back of the visitation room, a little room of exposed stone walls off to the side of the sanctuary in the Literal Heart of Jesus church.

I grabbed my little clutch and walked up the makeshift aisle between the rows of chairs.

My lanky, beautiful Gus.

A minister walked up and stood behind the coffin, almost like the coffin was a pulpit or something, and talked a little bit about how Augustus had a courageous battle and how his heroism in the face of illness was an inspiration to us all...

...he said, “In heaven, Augustus will finally be healed and whole,” implying that he had been less whole than other people due to his leglessness, and I kind of could not repress my sigh of disgust.

Peter Van Houten wore a white linen suit, tailored to account for his rotundity, a powder-blue dress shirt, and a green tie.

After a high school friend told some stories about Gus’s considerable basketball talents and his many qualities as a teammate, the minister said, “We’ll now hear a few words from Augustus’s special friend, Hazel.”

His pallbearers—cousins, his dad, an uncle, friends I’d never seen—came and got him, and they all started walking toward the hearse.

But at any rate he was quite insistent that I’d be absolved for my misbehavior if I attended his funeral and told you what became of Anna’s mother.

“All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.”

I think you’re a pathetic alcoholic who says fancy things to get attention like a really precocious eleven-year-old and I feel super bad for you.

Waking up was horrible, because for a disoriented moment I felt like everything was fine, and then it crushed me anew.

Appraising myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were Peter Van Houtens—miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt.

So we sat there for a couple hours talking to the screen together, navigating this invisible labyrinthine cave without a single lumen of light.

We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus when Gus told us that he feared oblivion, and I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus when Gus told us that he feared oblivion, and I told him that he was fearing something universal and inevitable, and how really, the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering.

Van Houten was just another of the endless mourners who did not know him, another too-late lamentation on his wall.

I was insufferable long before we lost her.

“Oh, Hazel,” she said, and kind of enveloped me, crying.

I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn’t distinguish among the pains.

“Is there anywhere he might have put a notebook? Like by his hospital bed or something?” The bed was already gone, reclaimed by hospice.

“You’ve just had the worst luck, darling. It’s unconscionable.”

I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith.

But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

I was just trying to notice everything: the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable mother zigzagging mustard across her turkey sandwich, my dad patting his handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a Frisbee that his dog kept running under and catching and returning to him.

Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?

Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered.

You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship.

It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care.