Do we die and leave disarray? No, we can talk our way through it.

It was unexpected when my colleague Ron asked me something very personal – whether I’d be willing to be his funeral celebrant. Our usual discussions were about citizens’ juries and public decision-making. I hadn’t known he was living with prostrate cancer.

Ron passed away in 2019. We’d made sure that everything was organised.

He left two daughters in their teens.

This post looks at the way a young adult fiction bestseller The Fault in our Stars played a role in mediating an understanding about death and dying, for his kids, two avid readers. As Ron put it, we don’t need to leave disarray, but to talk our way through.

So Ron how did you get on to ‘The Fault in Our Stars’?

Well, my 12-year old daughter, who lives mostly with her mother, got into the car after school, carrying the book. While she was grabbing her gear from her mother’s house, and later when she had to duck into a shop to buy something, I picked up the book and read a few pages and thought, “This isn’t bad”. So I decided immediately to get an electronic copy for myself. That evening all she wanted to do was read the book, and I began reading it on my tablet. At first she didn’t know we were reading the same book in parallel, and I was just a few chapters behind her!

What does this book do for young readers?

It mediates an understanding about dying, for any reader. In the end my daughter and I didn’t talk about it a lot, but she knew I knew and i knew she knew that we’d been deeply immersed in the big issues and questions about facing death. So the first question she asked me when she realised I was reading the book was “Is Hazel (the main character) a grenade yet?” Twenty minutes later I said, “Yup, she’s a grenade”.

Can you talk more about this image of being a grenade?

Well firstly my daughter’s question told me that this concept really struck her. Hazel has cancer. And when she says “I’m a grenade”, I understand. I’m sitting there facing my daughter as an expert on the matter, which I think she recognised and accepted. The grenade metaphor implies that as you die you leave disarray around you.

In fact you don’t. We just need to talk our way through it. Hazel was so afraid she’d hurt Augustus [her newfound boyfriend], that she’d die and leave him shattered. In fact the story shows that people who are dying can be full of life, and caring for them is a gift right up to the end. Through the narrative Hazel changed. She was in the process of becoming. She allowed herself to love and be loved. She could still become who she wanted to be.

What are other important themes from your perspective?

I think the book suggests that for many of us there’s a need to make a mark on the world that is amplified when you have to face mortality. Whether the mark is known or not. Augustus has this very clearly in mind, he’s heroic. Hazel is a bit more low key, but she is a critical thinker and questions many things, like me, I suppose. I want to make a bit more of a mark – just not sure what it is or how yet. So I could empathise with both characters.

The American way of life runs as an undercurrent in the story for me – dependence on the car, socialising at the mall, nuclear families coping, the role of the church …

Yes, there’s a lot of astute social commentary in the story. For example it portrays young people with cancer living in a claustrophobic, stifling environment of care. So Hazel’s mother couldn’t admit to her daughter that she’d been studying for a social work degree, in guilt-ridden fear of being accused of abandoning her child. These are traps we put ourselves in, in the name of care. This book is a catalyst for conversation about avoiding such pitfalls and negotiating our paths forward together.

At 10.30 my daughter finished the book. “It’s so sad,” she said, “It’s just so sad.” I finished it soon after, feeling calm and at peace. I know this book will inform our conversations in the future as my own disease progresses.

‘The Fault in our Stars’ John Green is published by Harper Collins.

It had 124 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, as recounted in The HuffPost .