My Sister's Keeper

When the oldest daughter, Kate, was a toddler, her family found out she had cancer. To meet her life and diet needs, her mom, Sarah, quit her career to stay at home and help her daughter full-time.

This strained her marriage as well as the relationships with her other two children, Jesse and Anna. The entire family’s identity shifted dramatically. They were no longer individuals. They were Kate’s support team. Jake’s dyslexia even went unnoticed for a time. This stressor led to other stressors causing a breakdown in the family.

Brian, the father, lost his wife. Sarah, lost her job and in a sense her identity. As the battle was an intense struggle, Sarah lost her identity. She was no longer a wife or lawyer. She was battling her daughter’s cancer. It was her full-time job. Jesse lost the attention he needed for his dyslexia to be noticed early on. As an adult, Jesse missed out on school until after his sister’s death. Anna was face with being stripped of future opportunities in life that she wanted to experience such as sports, pregnancy and the possibility of needing her own kidney for health reasons later in life, not to mention the physical strain she had already endured. Anna was faced with becoming more and more weak as the operations continued.

Anna was the resource used to save her sister. She did not just become the resource, she was designed and birthed by her parents intentionally to be the resource.

The stressor was a priority in the family. Usually people want to work through the stressor and put it behind them. However, that approach could not be used in this situation because you cannot resolve cancer. The stressor is permanent, at least until Kate’s death, in which case grieving becomes the new stressor. I believe these two stressors overlap and grieving begins prior to Kate’s death because they know ahead of time that she will in fact die. Everyone in the family shows signs of the acceptance stage of grieving, except for Sarah. Even Kate had accepted her own pending death.

I'm glad that the movie ending with them retreating to Montana on a yearly basis, because the day at beach where Brian tells Sarah he wants a divorce if she did not join them showed signs of a crumbling marriage. Although, in the moment that he said it, I had doubts about whether he meant. My interpretation was not that he meant it, but that he knew that was important and the statement was a sign of him not backing down on this one. Sarah usually had the final say in Kate's well-being, but Brian wanted his daughter to have good memories. In the driveway, Sarah kept yelling that going to the beach could kill her, but when I saw her on the beach my reaction was, 'No, today she's living.'