Hazel speaks at Support Group about oblivion

Late in the winter of her seventeenth year, Hazel Grace Lancaster attended a weekly Support Group for young cancer survivors in the basement of an Episcopal church shaped like a cross. The group met in a circle at the center of the cross, where the heart of Jesus would have been, a location the group leader, Patrick, invoked at every meeting. Hazel, who had thyroid cancer with metastases in her lungs and relied on a portable oxygen tank, usually said little during the sessions, communicating with her friend Isaac through sighs. But when Patrick asked Augustus Waters, a seventeen-year-old osteosarcoma survivor attending at Isaac's request, to share his fears, Augustus replied without hesitation, "I fear oblivion," adding, "I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark." Patrick seemed lost and asked if anyone wanted to speak to that. Hazel, who was not the hand-raising type, decided to speak. She half raised her hand, and Patrick, his delight evident, immediately called on her. She looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at her with eyes so blue you could almost see through them. "There will come a time," she said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does." She had learned this perspective from her favorite book, An Imperial Affliction by Peter Van Houten, the only person she had ever come across who seemed to understand what it is like to be dying and not have died. After she finished, there was a long period of silence. She watched a smile spread all the way across Augustus's face—not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at her, but his real smile, too big for his face. "Goddamn," Augustus said quietly. "Aren't you something else." Neither of them said anything for the rest of Support Group. At the end, they all had to hold hands, and Patrick led them in a prayer that included a long list of the dead. When it was over, Augustus walked over to her. His gait was crooked like his smile. He towered over her but kept his distance so she would not have to crane her neck. He asked her full name, and she told him: Hazel Grace Lancaster. He was about to say something else when Isaac walked up. Augustus raised a finger, turned to Isaac, and said, "That was actually worse than you made it out to be." Isaac replied, "I told you it was bleak." Augustus then leaned in so he thought Hazel could not hear and asked Isaac, "She's a regular?" After Isaac's response, Augustus said, "I'll say." He then asked Isaac to tell Hazel about clinic, and Isaac launched into a story about his surgeon. When Isaac left, Augustus turned to Hazel and said, "Literally," referring to being in the heart of Jesus. Hazel laughed and said, "Someone should tell Jesus. I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart." Augustus replied, "I would tell Him myself, but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside of His heart, so He won't be able to hear me." He shook his head, just looking at her. When she asked why he was looking at her like that, he half smiled and said, "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued, and Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything." Hazel scoffed and said she was not beautiful, but Augustus compared her to a millennial Natalie Portman, specifically V for Vendetta Natalie Portman. He then invited her to his house to watch the movie, and she agreed, leaving with him in his car. This speech, delivered in the Literal Heart of Jesus, was the first real conversation between Hazel and Augustus, and it set the terms of their relationship: a shared acknowledgment of oblivion, a mutual attraction to each other's intelligence and honesty, and a willingness to find meaning in the face of inevitable loss. The speech also introduced the philosophical theme that would recur throughout their story, from Hazel's later description of herself as "a grenade" to Augustus's confession that he feared oblivion and his desire to leave a mark. Hazel's words, drawn from her reading of An Imperial Affliction, became a touchstone for both of them, a way of articulating the existential weight of their illness and the urgency of their love. The moment also marked a turning point for Hazel, who had been withdrawn and reluctant to engage with the group; her decision to speak, prompted by Augustus's vulnerability, initiated a chain of events that would lead to their romance, their trip to Amsterdam, and their confrontation with Peter Van Houten. The speech itself, with its stark vision of universal forgetfulness, was both a challenge to Augustus's fear of oblivion and an invitation to live fully in the present, a paradox that defined their time together.