This Star Won't Go Out

Later that night, Esther, her friends, and I went for a walk (taking turns pushing Esther’s wheelchair) out into Boston to get coffee and gelato. I will never succeed in explaining to you how fun this was, how much it felt like a grand adventure along the lines of scaling Mount Everest as we wound around the centuries-old streets in search of dessert.

I made a video about Esther a couple weeks later, and she soon became something of a celebrity in the nerdfighter community. For the last months of her life, she handled this newfound attention with grace (which was, after all, her middle name). She even started making her own vlogs, and even though she was very sick and within weeks of death, they were funny and charming and found a broad audience. We stayed in touch, and she kept visiting with her friends in the Catitude chat, even when the conversation at times moved too quickly for her as her condition worsened.

The last thing she ever filmed was part of a Catitude collaboration video for my thirty-third birthday, which was on August 24, 2010. By the time the video went live, Esther was back in the ICU. She died in the early hours of August 25th.

When we think of death, we often imagine it as happening in degrees: We think of a sick person becoming less and less alive until finally they are gone. But even in her final days, Esther was wholly alive, as alive as anyone else, and so even though everyone who loved her understood she was dying, her death was still a terrible shock to me. She did not leave slowly, but all at once, because even when she could not get out of bed, she found ways to be fully alive: to play with her friends, to crack jokes, to love and to be loved. And then she was gone, all at once.

I’ve said many times that The Fault in Our Stars, while it is dedicated to Esther, is not about her. When the book was published, lots of reporters wanted me to talk about Esther; they wanted to know if my book was “based on a true story.” I never really knew how to deal with these questions, and I still don’t, because the truth (as always) is complicated. Esther inspired the story in the sense that my anger after her death pushed me to write constantly. She helped me to imagine teenagers as more empathetic than I’d given them credit for, and her charm and snark inspired the novel, too, but the character of Hazel is very different from Esther, and Hazel’s story is not Esther’s. Esther’s story belonged to her, and fortunately for us she was an extraordinary writer, who in these pages tells that story beautifully. I find comfort in that, but make no mistake: I am still pissed off that she died. I still miss her. I still find her loss an intolerable injustice. And I wish she’d read The Fault in Our Stars. I am astonished that the book has found such a broad audience, but the person I most want to read it never will.

I mentioned earlier that when Esther kept me off the dance floor that night in 2009, it wasn’t the last time she saved me from catastrophe. In fact, she is still saving me, all the time. In these pages, and in my memories, she reminds me that a short life can also be a good and rich life, that it is possible to live with depression without being consumed by it, and that meaning in life is found together, in family and friendship that transcends and survives all manner of suffering. As the poet wrote in the Bible’s Song of Solomon, “Love is strong as death.” Or perhaps even stronger.





ESTHER GRACE an introduction


by Esther’s parents, Lori and Wayne Earl




Star Pillow,

SAUDI ARABIA, 2000




Esther at work,

MASSACHUSETTS, 2003


From the time she was little, Esther was certain she was going to be a writer. And we believed her. She loved words, felt their power, and believed in the magic of story. Later, she would keep a running list of ideas and characters she hoped to develop. We encouraged her to write and promised enthusiastically to help her find an audience for her work.

From about age eight, she began keeping a diary and increased the pace of her entries as she grew older. Of course, she didn’t keep a diary with the idea that what she wrote down would one day be published. She wrote because she had to. She was passionate about the process and found it essential for her mental and emotional health to be able to get her thoughts out of her head and onto the page. Like many people her age, keeping a journal helped her navigate the passage from childhood to young adulthood; writing became increasingly critical after her diagnosis.