My Sister’s Keeper: The Inevitability of Death
Jodi Picoult, the author of the novel My Sister’s Keeper, expresses through the Fitzgerald family the fact that death is inevitable. Anna Fitzgerald was conceived to be a compatible donor for her older sister, who has leukemia, named Kate. The entire book is Anna going to court to sue her parents for the rights to her own body after they requested that she donate her kidney. While testifying, Anna reveals that Kate was tired of fighting and told Anna not to donate her kidney as she would rather die than to continue not only her own, but her family’s suffering ‘ “But everyone’s worked so hard just to keep you alive. You can’t kill yourself.’ All of a sudden Kate started to cry. “I know I can’t” It took me a few moments to realize this meant she’d already tried before.” (Picoult 388-389).
Kate came to terms with her death, but every single member of her family was willing to sacrifice everything just to keep her alive, even Anna. In the end, Anna passes away in a car crash; unknowingly donating her kidney to Kate. The entire book is told in first person switching through a few of the characters in each chapter, but Kate’s perspective isn’t shown until the epilogue where Anna has died and Kate has received the kidney transplant. I believe the reason Kate’s perspective isn’t introduced until Anna dies is the entire book we think that Kate is going to die, so we don’t see the opinion of the dying person; when we see Kate’s perspective Anna has died and Kate is no longer dying. Although Anna hated being in the hospital she never doubted going once because she loved her sister, but what if the best thing for them both was for one of them to die.
As shown in the book, being in the wrong place at the wrong time can kill you. People believe we die for various reasons, but all of these reasons have something in common: you can’t control when death is going to affect your life. Kate considered killing herself multiple times and had a rare form of leukemia that everyone thought was going to kill her eventually whereas Anna was perfectly healthy and had a long life ahead of her, but in the end, Anna was the sister who ended up dying and Kate, with all odds stacked against her, lived a perfectly healthy life.
