The Fault in Our Stars

Augustus’s funeral takes place at the Literal Heart of Jesus Church. Hazel makes painful chitchat with his family while the mourners pay their respects. When she sees the coffin unattended, Hazel takes off her oxygen tank and approaches. She kisses his cheek and whispers their “always” (something Isaac and Monica said to each other frequently during their relationship) to him: “‘It’s okay, Gus. Okay’” (269). She sneaks a pack of cigarettes into the coffin and says that he can light them now. When the minister gives a contrived, conventional sermon about heroism in the face of illness, Hazel can’t help but emit a disapproving sigh. A voice from the pew behind her whispers, “‘What a load of horse crap, eh, kid?’” and she turns to see Peter Van Houten (271). 

Isaac delivers a eulogy that is more serious than the one he gave at the prefuneral, and then Hazel is introduced to give hers. Hazel’s eulogy is also dramatically different from her previous one, and it is seemingly uncharacteristic of her. She begins, “‘There’s a great quote in Gus’s house, one that both he and I found very comforting: Without pain, we couldn’t know joy.’”She “[goes] on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus’s parents, arm in arm, [hug] each other and [nod] at every word. Funerals, I had decided, [are] for the living” (272).

After the service, Hazel doesn’t want to go to the burial but she does, and Peter Van Houten brazenly asks for a ride home from the graveyard. Hazel accepts a drink from his flask of whiskey. Van Houten tells her that he had corresponded with Augustus a few times in his last weeks and that Augustus had asked him to come to his funeral and finally tell Hazel what happens to Anna’s mother after the end of An Imperial Affliction. Hazel, though, refuses to listen to the explanation she had previously gone to Amsterdam to seek; she calls Van Houten a “pathetic alcoholic who says fancy things to get attention” and kicks him out of the car (277). At home, she admits to her dad that she is furious about Augustus’s cancer but feels like it was a privilege to love him; her dad tells her that’s how he feels about her.

Hazel goes to Isaac’s house, and they play video games using the speech-based modification for blind people, which quickly devolves into them just giving absurd instructions to the computer. They talk about Augustus, and Isaac asks if he ever gave Hazel “that thing he was writing”—apparently, Augustus was working on a sequel to An Imperial Affliction for Hazel (281). Hazel immediately leaves to see if she can find it at Augustus’s house, and as soon as she starts the car, she is alarmed to see Peter Van Houten sitting in the back seat. He tells her he wants to apologize and that she reminds him of Anna. Hazel is furious and yells at him to leave, but he breaks down crying, and “it [is] around then I [realize] he [has] a dead person in his family” (284). His daughter died of leukemia, like Anna, when she was eight, and he wrote the novel to give her a second life, where she lived a little longer. Hazel feels pity for him for the first time, and she tells him to sober up and write a new novel. He says he will and gets out of the car, still drinking from his bottle of whiskey. 

When Hazel gets to Augustus’s house to look for the manuscript, his parents tell her that they aren’t ready to go down to his basement room yet, but she can look there. She can’t find any files on his computer or any notes on his desk. She climbs into his bed to smell his scent, but leaves without finding what he had written to her. 

Augustus’s father calls a few days later to tell Hazel that a few pages are missing from a Moleskine notebook that Augustus had with him at the hospital, but he doesn’t know where the pages might be. Hazel heads to Support Group early that day, thinking Augustus might have stashed them somewhere at the prefuneral for her to find, but they aren’t hidden anywhere in the Literal Heart of Jesus Church. She is unusually honest with the group, telling Patrick, the leader, that she wants to die; when he responds by asking, “‘Why don’t you?’” she doesn’t have a good answer but thinks maybe she owes it to everyone who didn’t get to live a full life (294).

At home, Hazel is depressed and doesn’t want to eat or talk to her parents. When they tell her she has to take care of herself, she is unable to contain her outburst, shouting that she can’t stay healthy because she’s dying and she can’t do anything about it. She admits that she worries constantly about her parents and how they’ll cope with her death: “‘I want you guys to have a life […] I worry that you won’t have a life, that you’ll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves’” (296). Hazel’s mom reveals that she’s been working toward her master’s degree in social work and that she wants to help counsel families of cancer patients or people dealing with illness; she never said anything about this so Hazel wouldn’t feel abandoned. Hazel is thrilled to learn that her mother will have a purpose beyond taking care of her, and her parents reassure her that they won’t divorce or become bitter alcoholics whose lives are ruined by her death. She cries tears of real happiness imagining this future after she is gone.

Kaitlyn calls to check in with Hazel and asks her what it is like to be in love; for the first time, Hazel feels more worldly and sophisticated than her friend. When Kaitlyn asks if Augustus ever wrote her love letters, Hazel gets an idea. As soon as they get off the phone, she emails Lidewij to see if Augustus mailed the notebook pages to Peter Van Houten. Lidewij promises to go to his house and check, bringing her boyfriend in case Peter makes a scene. Hazel thinks about Lidewij’s life and wishes she could know what it’s like to have a boyfriend when she is in her twenties with all the independence adulthood brings. 

Hazel’s mom informs her that it is Bastille Day, so they are going on a picnic to celebrate. They watch children playing in artificial ruins at the park, and Hazel wonders whether some kind of eternity does really exist. They go to Augustus’s grave, and Hazel plants a French flag from her mother’s Bastille Day decorations. 

When they return, Lidewij has written to say that they found Augustus’s letter; the scanned pages from his notebook are attached. He sent the pages to Van Houten with a request for help in writing a eulogy for Hazel, by taking his notes and making them into a coherent whole. The best and truest thing about Hazel, Augustus writes, is that while most people are desperate to leave a mark, and don’t mind if they hurt each other to do it, “she walks lightly upon the earth,” doing no harm to anyone or anything, and “isn’t that the real heroism?” (311). He writes that he knows his death will hurt Hazel, and while you have no choice in whether you get hurt in this world, you can choose who hurts you; he hopes Hazel likes her choices. The novel ends with Hazel saying, “‘I do, Augustus’” (313).