THE FAULT IN OUR STARS (2012)

 John Green/ Novel

Cancer. A word which does not require any other word to follow it yet makes a resounding impact. You may know one who has it, who had it, or you are afraid of it, yourself- like me. I am a guy who fears the world of mother med. I do not like talking or thinking about diseases; hospital confinement weakens me.

Much to my surprise, The Fault in Our Starts by John Green talks about two teenage protagonists whose early lives were spent battling with the big C. As a reader, I know that I would have to surpass my limitations and deal with reading topics which normally scare me or make me anxious.

So I had to read TFIOS.

Hazel is not your typical cancer patient. She long accepted the fact that she is dying. She is only afraid of leaving like a bomb fallen on a field- destroying the area; thus, shattering happy lives of her loved ones. For this, she mostly had emotional episodes with her parents. Meanwhile, Augustus has pre-survived a leg operation and was declared NEC (no evidence of cancer). But this was only given on the surface.

It was crush-on-first-sight for Hazel when Gus first appeared in the Cancer Kids Support Group. Romantically speaking, it was not hard for Gus to be close with her. They started exchanging books, playing with common friends, spending time with each other’s families, and sharing their life wishes.

As the story progressed, I cried, laughed, and wept as to how Hazel and Gus have come to love each other (with special credits to their trip to the Netherlands in pursuit of the author of their beloved open-ended novel ‘An Imperial Affliction’), and how their lives have seemingly intertwined with the terminal disease they carry both literally and figuratively.

The world is not a wish-granting factory.

As funny as the book may be for young adults, it teaches us a lot of truth in this world from the viewpoint of teens who are deprived of longevity and youth.

The more the world is unfair, the more it is fair to you. Life gives us trials and sometimes sorrow and remorse- to test our strength and faith. It is an unwritten fact that we cannot get what we always want. Worse is that if you want to live cancer-free, like Hazel and Gus.

Most, if not, all of us, may still be wishing for grander things to happen in our lives, but I hope we could all reflect at how lucky we are not to be diagnosed with the big C-and let us try our best not to.

Should we remain discontented, we could all die of cancer- not medical cancer but spiritual, emotional psychological and social cancer. So, let us try to be thankful with what we have and what He gives us, for it should be enough.

It pains to know how the lives of Hazel and Gus have gone. As said in the book, without pain, we couldn’t know joy. To affirm it, we must first experience the bad side of life in order to fully appreciate it. But there could be another option for us- face the bad side with a smile and embrace it for a while, while walking hand-in-hand with the good side.