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back to Caroline Mathers’s tribute pages, reading about how heroic her fight was, and how much she was missed, and how she was in a better
place, and how she would live forever in their memories, and how everyone who knew her—everyone—was laid low by her leaving.
Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with A ugustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very
clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate—she seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which
made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was
Have Cancer.
A nyway, eventually I started reading Caroline Mathers’s little notes, which were mostly actually written by her parents, because I guess
her brain cancer was of the variety that makes you not you before it makes you not alive.
So it was all like, Caroline continues to have behavioral problems. She’s struggling a lot with anger and frustration over not being able to speak (we are frustrated about these things, too, of course, but we have more socially acceptable ways of dealing with our anger). Gus has
taken to calling Caroline HULK SMA SH, which resonates with the doctors. There’s nothing easy about this for any of us, but you take your
humor where you can get it. Hoping to go home on Thursday. We’ll let you know . . .
She didn’t go home on Thursday, needless to say.
So of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him—inevitably. A nd that’s what I’d felt as he reached for me: I’d felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.
I decided to text him. I wanted to avoid a whole conversation about it.
Hi, so okay, I don’t know if you’ll understand this but I can’t kiss you or anything. Not that you’d necessarily want to, but I can’t.
When I try to look at you like that, all I see is what I’m going to put you through. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you.
A nyway, sorry.
He responded a few minutes later.
Okay.
I wrote back.
Okay.
He responded:
Oh, my God, stop flirting with me!
I just said:
Okay.
My phone buzzed moments later.
I was kidding, Hazel Grace. I understand. (But we both know that okay is a very flirty word. Okay is BURSTING with sensuality.)
I was very tempted to respond Okay again, but I pictured him at my funeral, and that helped me text properly.
Sorry.
* * *
I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the
shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, “You are not a grenade, not to us.
Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can’t know, sweetie, because you’ve never
had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Really,” my dad said. “I wouldn’t bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you’re worth, we’d just toss you out on the
streets.”
“We’re not sentimental people,” Mom added, deadpan. “We’d leave you at an orphanage with a note pi
I laughed.
“You don’t have to go to Support Group,” Mom added. “You don’t have to do anything. Except go to school.” She handed me the bear.
“I think Bluie can sleep on the shelf tonight,” I said. “Let me remind you that I am more than thirty-three half years old.”
“Keep him tonight,” she said.
“Mom,” I said.
“He’s lonely,” she said.
“Oh, my God, Mom,” I said. But I took stupid Bluie and kind of cuddled with him as I fell asleep.
I still had one arm draped over Bluie, in fact, when I awoke just after four in the morning with an apocalyptic pain fingering out from the unreachable center of my head.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Iscreamed to wake up my parents, and they burst into the room, but there was nothing they could do to dim the supernovae exploding
inside my brain, an endless chain of intracranial firecrackers that made me think that I was once and for all going, and I told myself—as I’ve told myself before—that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.
Dad drove, talking on the phone with the hospital, while I lay in the back with my head in Mom’s lap. There was nothing to do:
Screaming made it worse. A ll stimuli made it worse, actually.
The only solution was to try to unmake the world, to make it black and silent and uninhabited again, to return to the moment before the
Big Bang, in the begi
People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years,
and still I trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.
I woke up in the ICU. I could tell I was in the ICU because I didn’t have my own room, and because there was so much beeping, and because
I was alone: They don’t let your family stay with you 24/7 in the ICU at Children’s because it’s an infection risk. There was wailing down the hall. Somebody’s kid had died. I was alone. I hit the red call button.
A nurse came in seconds later. “Hi,” I said.
“Hello, Hazel. I’m A lison, your nurse,” she said.
“Hi, A lison My Nurse,” I said.
Whereupon I started to feel pretty tired again. But I woke up a bit when my parents came in, crying and kissing my face repeatedly, and I
reached up for them and tried to squeeze, but my everything hurt when I squeezed, and Mom and Dad told me that I did not have a brain
tumor, but that my headache was caused by poor oxygenation, which was caused by my lungs swimming in fluid, a liter and a half (!!!!) of
which had been successfully drained from my chest, which was why I might feel a slight discomfort in my side, where there was, hey look at
that, a tube that went from my chest into a plastic bladder half full of liquid that for all the world resembled my dad’s favorite amber ale. Mom told me I was going to go home, that I really was, that I would just have to get this drained every now and again and get back on the BiPA P, this nighttime machine that forces air in and out of my crap lungs. But I’d had a total body PET scan on the first night in the hospital, they told me, and the news was good: no tumor growth. No new tumors. My shoulder pain had been lack-of-oxygen pain. Heart-working-too-hard
pain.
“Dr. Maria said this morning that she remains optimistic,” Dad said. I liked Dr. Maria, and she didn’t bullshit you, so that felt good to
hear.
“This is just a thing, Hazel,” my mom said. “It’s a thing we can live with.”
I nodded, and then A lison My Nurse kind of politely made them leave. She asked me if I wanted some ice chips, and I nodded, and then