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Life is just a side effect of dying.
This was one of the many gorgeous thoughts of Hazel Grace, cancer survivor? sufferer human being.
She would say to you, should you ever try to tell her that she had battled cancer, that she hadn’t battled at all. That it was all a pointless fight left to the only people who are ignorant enough to believe that they could ever win. Because death always wins in the end. Of course.
Ah, Hazel.
Hazel, the great. Hazel, the brave, the smart, the beautiful, the best. Hazel, the amazing. Someone should sing “Amazing Grace” to her, only replace the lyrics with “Amazing Hazel Grace”. That’s something she deserved to get. Hazel Grace deserved millions upon millions of songs. Hazel Grace deserved a choir of angels with harps on clouds, because, fuck it, even notions so cliché and laughably stupid and altogether wonderful as those sorts of things were something that she deserved.
We rarely get what we deserve.
After the funeral, Hazel found herself pretty distraught.
It wasn’t so much sadness as an all-encompassing melancholy, and she would spend hours and hours and hours just looking out windows. Mostly when it was raining, and the drops could reflect her beautiful eyes and her beautiful mouth and her beautiful mind. Her mind, which didn’t deserve what its body had to deal with.
Hazel was always the philosopher-esque type. Now, I don’t pretend to know what it feels like to think half as deeply as that wonderful girl did, but I do know that I’m not sure I would’ve wanted to. It seems like such a burden, doesn’t it? Such a burden on the hearts of everyone who comes into contact with you, too. It’s like carrying your heart in your pocket, but also having the misfortune to have such a heavy heart that it can weigh you down sometimes.
It can wear you right down, six feet under, till you can’t go down anymore for fear of breaking through your coffin.
That wasn’t what happened to Hazel.
No, Hazel was much too strong for that, bless her heavy heart.
After a while, she stopped looking in windows for so long. I could still catch her, though, on lonely nights and smoky mornings. When she thought nobody was looking, I saw her. (She didn’t see me.)
She smiled more. Some of the smiles were fake, put there for the benefit of everybody else more than herself. Some of them were real. I loved the moments that they were real.
After she turned eighteen, Hazel Grace decided that she needed to get out. So she packed up and told her parents that she’d come over for dinner every other night, don’t worry about her, she was an adult now, really, and that she needed them to live, so that she could live. Her parents weren’t happy. But parents are like that.
Hazel: I promise, I’ll be fine.
Mom: Hazel –
Hazel: I’m still your little girl. I’m just a little girl who needs to go out and get a taste of the desserts before they run out. Please, Mom.
Dad: She’s still our little girl.
Hazel: Always.
Mom: Promise?
Hazel: Always.
Hazel moved out into the city, and she got herself a small little homey apartment on the first floor of a nice building that allowed pets and had an old swimming pool, open 9-5, 7-7 on weekends. She was going to get the third floor one at first, but, y’know – Cancer Perks.
She kept going to school. She decided to take both literature and philosophy classes, and ended up going along with the literature ones more than the philosophy ones. She was surprised, but so is life.
Hazel started to write.
I think it helped her. I really do. You read stories about writers who find solace in their pens, and I think that that’s true. So true.
Hazel smiled more when she wrote. She wrote and wrote and wrote, and her teachers were astounded by the groundbreaking observance, stark honesty and staggering understanding that this skinny little girl (woman?) and her cannula brought with them everywhere they went.
I think the best part was when she wrote poems.
Hazel Grace had said she wasn’t a poem-writer. But she lied. Oh man, she lied.
My favorite is the one she wrote while sipping a cup of chai tea at a bakery downtown. She was wearing a pink-and-yellow dress with these little flowers all over it that day. And these big, blocky boots that made it look like she could squash small children with her feet. (Not that she would.)
We're the flashiest girls
and the most dashing-est boys
but we are dying,
slowly, very
slowly.
We die from the cigarettes
that we don’t smoke, and
we die from the breaths
that we don’t take.
And we die from the whispers
of words we give meaning to.
We’re the flashiest girls
And the most dashing-est boys
But we are living (somehow),
slowly, very
slowly.
Hazel graduated after her 24th birthday.
She blew out the candles with her parents, who loved her, and she opened gifts, which she loved. The most important thing she unwrapped was a typewriter, and the least important thing she unwrapped was a card, because she already knew what everyone felt.
She was Hazel Grace. She knew almost everything about almost everything.
She was a published author the next year.
Hazel kept writing, and she kept living. She published a book of poems
and a book of meaning
and a book of life
and a book of memories.
She spoke at schools and lectured at colleges and got an award, and then got another one.
I have to say that Hazel Grace did a lot with the time that she had.
Hazel Grace Lancaster’s flickering star faded out on a bitter, fall morning.
The wind rustled the trees and the grass and the skeleton leaves, and she went outside to be with the birds and the bugs before she went away.
Her family let her be alone. She asked the nurses, weary and frail and gaunt, if she could be wheeled outside. She could tell that it was soon.
They took her out to the courtyard outside her hospital room, and then they grudgingly left her with her thoughts.
“Augustus… I’m scared. I mean, I know everyone’s scared, but I just never knew it’d be this terrifying. I wish that you were here to pretend to smoke and make up some stupid metaphor,” she smiled.
“I’ve been missing you for a whole while now. And it seems like forever ago that I last saw you. In fact, it was infinity. I last saw you countless infinities prior to this moment.
“I thought, as I got older, that it’d seem stupid to keep loving you. But it doesn’t. It’s just something that is. And speaking of is’, I think I’m ready to give mine up. I’ll give up my ‘is’. I’m ready.
“I don’t believe in Something, with a capital ‘S’. Not like you did. I hope you got your Something, though. But I’m ready to go.”
Hazel looked down at the blanket on her lap, and brushed her hands against the blue cotton. She was crying now.
“You never left me, Augustus. You never did. And I’m happy to have been hurt by you. It was a privilege. You said that to me once. And I understand now.”
Hazel Grace the great. Hazel, the brave, the smart, the beautiful, the best. Hazel, the amazing.
Hazel Grace became a supernova ten years after her heart was broken by one.
And when the black hit, I was gone, too. Because this was my Something – living on with Hazel. It was a Something that I could never be thankful enough for.
The beauty of death is that is never really is the end. Your memory lives on.
Even more so if you just live, and move past all of the other stuff.
And live.
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. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.
People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.