"Van Houten,
I am a good person, but a shitty writer. Youâre a shitty person, but a good writer. Weâd make a good team. I donât want to ask you any favors, but if you have time - and from what I saw, you have plenty - I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. Iâve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever. Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Hereâs 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. Thatâs what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But, Van Houten, the marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous mini-mall or start a coup or try to become a rock star, and you think, âTheyâll remember me, now.â But, A) they donât remember you, and B) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your mini-mall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe Iâm not such a shitty writer. But I canât pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I canât fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything âmineâ in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I canât stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know itâs silly and useless - especially useless in my current state - but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: weâre as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and weâre not likely to do either. People will say itâs sad, and that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But itâs not sad, Van Houten. Itâs triumphant. Itâs heroic. Isnât that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes, anyway, arenât the people doing things; the real heroes are the people noticing things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didnât actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didnât get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die before I could tell her that I was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost-black dark blue, and I just held her hand, and tried to imagine the world without us. And for one second, I was a good enough person to hope she died, so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors werenât allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, âSheâs still taking on water.â A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You donât get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: you know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You donât get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.â
âI do, Augustus. I do.â
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