Funeral of Augustus Waters

The funeral of Augustus Waters took place in a small side room of the Episcopal church whose basement housed the Support Group—a room Hazel privately called the Literal Hand of Jesus, the part of the cross where he was nailed. The space was filled with about eighty chairs, two-thirds full, and felt one-third empty. Hazel sat in the back, watching strangers kneel beside the coffin and touch its wood rather than the body inside, because no one wants to touch the dead. Gus’s parents, hollow-eyed and exhausted, stood by the casket hugging everyone who passed, and when they noticed Hazel they shuffled over and held on to her too tightly, the way Gus used to. His mother told Hazel, "He loved you so much. It wasn't puppy love or anything," as if Hazel did not already know. Talking to them felt like stabbing and being stabbed.

The Coffin and the Cigarettes

Hazel walked up the makeshift aisle alone, pulling the oxygen tube from her nostrils and handing it to her father so it could be just her and just him. She wore a plain black dress because she no longer fit into the little black dress she had bought for her fifteenth birthday party, her death dress. Augustus wore the same thin-lapeled suit he had worn to Oranjee in Amsterdam. His hair was parted neatly on the left side in a way he would have found horrifying, and his face was plasticized, but he was still her lanky, beautiful Gus. His eyes were closed, and she would never see his blue eyes again. She knelt and whispered, "I love you present tense," then put her hand on the middle of his chest and said, "It's okay, Gus. It's okay. It is. It's okay, you hear me?" She had absolutely no confidence that he could hear her. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. Then she snapped open her clutch, pulled out a hard pack of Camel Lights, and snuck them into the space between his side and the coffin's plush silver lining, whispering, "You can light these. I won't mind."

The Minister's Words and Hazel's Eulogy

A minister stood behind the coffin and spoke about how Augustus had fought a courageous battle and how his heroism in the face of illness was an inspiration to them all. When the minister said, "In heaven, Augustus will finally be healed and whole," implying that his leglessness had made him less whole, Hazel could not repress a sigh of disgust. Her father grabbed her above the knee and cut her a disapproving look, but from the row behind her someone muttered almost inaudibly near her ear, "What a load of horse crap, eh, kid?" Hazel spun around and saw Peter Van Houten in a white linen suit, looking like he was dressed for a colonial occupation of Panama. He whispered, "We gotta fake pray," and bowed his head. After Isaac spoke—calling Augustus the Mayor of the Secret City of Cancervania and telling the story of how Gus burst into his hospital room after his eye surgery to announce that Isaac would live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments—the minister called up "Augustus's special friend, Hazel." Hazel began by correcting him: "I was his girlfriend." She then read from the eulogy she had written, starting with the Encouragement from Gus's house: "Without pain, we couldn't know joy." She went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, she had decided, are for the living.

The Unbearable Aftermath

After the service, Hazel did not want to go to the burial. She told her parents she was tired, that there would be no place to sit, that it would last forever. But her mother insisted they had to go for Mr. and Mrs. Waters. So Hazel did all of it: she watched them lower him into the ground in the spot he had picked out with his father, she saw his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain, she tossed a handful of dirt onto his grave, and she stood beneath the clear blue sky with its certain slant of afternoon light, thinking about her own plot and her own casket and her own dirt. After it was over, Peter Van Houten approached her, drunk, and offered her a ride. In the car he told her that Augustus had written to him insisting that Van Houten attend the funeral and tell Hazel what became of Anna's mother. Van Houten gave his answer—"Omnis cellula e cellula," all cells come from cells—but Hazel was in no mood for his games. She told him he was a pathetic alcoholic who said fancy things to get attention, that he was not the man who wrote An Imperial Affliction anymore, and then she made him get out of the car. As they drove away, she watched him through the back window, raising his bottle in a toast, his eyes so sad. She felt kinda bad for him, to be honest. At home, she slept with the BiPAP for a couple hours, and waking up was horrible because for a disoriented moment she felt like everything was fine, and then it crushed her anew. She appraised herself in the mirror and thought there were two kinds of adults: Peter Van Houtens, miserable creatures who scoured the earth for something to hurt, and people like her parents, who walked around zombically doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around. Neither future seemed desirable. She had already seen everything pure and good in the world, and she was beginning to suspect that even if death did not get in the way, the kind of love she and Augustus shared could never last. So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.