An emotional tale
Tulip Chowdhury studies a family catastrophe
30 December 2011, 18:00 PM
My Sister's Keeper
Jodi Picoult
Washington Square Press
A mother is supposed to love her children equally. But for Sara Fitzgerald this is a twisted truth. Her elder daughter Kate is a patient of leukemia and her younger daughter Anna is genetically programmed to be an organ donor for Kate. Anna is the sibling who can save her sister. For Sara and Brian, her husband there is the choice of saving Kate through using Anna as the donor or save Anna from the pains of undergoing countless surgeries, transfusions and shots that her role as the donor requires. They wonder, can a parent love a child too much or is too much love never enough?
Anna never questions her role as a donor and goes to the hospital to donate blood or be the donor to bone marrow transplants. Then one day when the question of donating one of her kidneys comes into light, Anna, now a teenager begins to question who she really is. Unlike most teenagers Anna has always been defined in terms of her sister. Anna decides that her opinion does matter and approaches an attorney to file a lawsuit on her parents. She does not want to donate her kidney. With the help of her attorney, Campbell Alexander, she seeks medical emancipation. Sara, a non-practicing lawyer herself is devastated and tries to confirm Campbell that it is all a misunderstanding, that Anna would not file a lawsuit in her right mind. But when Campbell approaches Anna, she is determined to go ahead with the case.
The story in My Sister's Keeper takes the reader on an emotional roller coaster. The day Anna decides that she has a right to decide whether to be a donor or not, there begins the Fitzgerald family's catastrophe. Kate has to be admitted to hospital off and on. One day she has developed an infection and another day she has nasal bleeding that soaks her whole bed. And then another day she has cardiac problems. And all through these she needs Anna, needs her blood, her stem cells, her tissue and her kidney. Sara has to coerce Anna to be there for her sister. Anna has difficulty in finding her own existence without filling in for her sister and that is what annoys her. Can't her life be worth for her own self?
The story shows that love conquers mountains of anger and gives peace in the most tumultuous moments. Anna knows she is hurting every time she has to donate something from her body. Yet when her mother takes her to Kate, when she sees her sister, frail and pale, slipping away from them; she forgets her pains and agrees to be the donor once again. Anna gets a chance to play for the national soccer team and that means she has to go to another state. But Sara refuses to let her go for Kate may become sick any moment and Anna might be called in to donate blood or stem cells. At first Anna is bitter. But when she goes to the hospital and Kate smiles at her, Anna knows that she cannot go away, that she has to be there for Kate. For a thirteen year old like Anna, it's extremely frustrating to be used by her mother for a sister and yet she loves Kate dearly. Brian, on the other hand takes Anna's side and agrees that she has a right to file the law suit. Though this brings rift between Sara and Brian but Anna finds some solace that one of her parents may be thinking of her over Kate's needs.
There are times when life becomes overwhelming and Brian, a firefighter sometimes feels that every day he has to fight an invisible fire at home. As Brian and Sarah are whole time occupied taking care of Kate, they fail to note that Jesse, their teenage son has taken to drugs and alcohol. Then he gets into the jail for stealing a car. Anna takes her lawyer, Campbell to bail him out. Campbell asks Anna why her parents are not looking into Jesse's problems. Anna replies that Jesse is "like a squirrel in an elephant's cage". The squirrel is insignificant because the parents are too busy with the elephant of the family, meaning Katy. The Fitzgerald family seems to be plunging into deeper crisis every day as Jesse runs into other problems with the law.
Life is a constant uphill battle for Kate, every day she sleeps knowing that she might not wake up the next day. And in the frail life enters beautiful romance. She meets Taylor, a quiet, gentle young man who is also a patient of leukemia. Taylor and Kate fall in love at first sight. The parents watch on, their hearts lurching with pain. They wonder how long life will bless these two young hearts to love each other ? Both of them have lost their hair for the chemotherapy. One day Sara catches them kissing and thinks that the look "…beautiful, those alabaster heads bent smooth as statues, an optical illusion, a mirror image that's folding into itself."
The story continues with Kate's battles for survival and the courtroom scenarios opening into Campbell's fights for Anna. Sewn into the story of this provocative novel are some important ethical issues that make the reader ponder and debate. The Fitzgerald family does not know how far their tumultuous life will go. Indeed will Anna win and stop her role as the donor for Kate? Will they be able to find another donor to keep Kate alive? Sara could not stop hoping that Anna will come out of her stand and agree to donate a kidney for her sister. All these issues keep the reader on emotional upheavals and it becomes impossible to put the book down until the word of the story is read. The climax waits to be discovered and relished on. The language of the storyline is lucid and explicit, giving the reader sublime reading hours. Jodi Picoult won the American Library Association's Alex Award for the novel My Sister's Keeper. A must read for Picoult fans!
Tulip Chowdhury writes fiction and is a poet.
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