"My sister's keeper"

I have a particular habit of watching sad movies on a long flight. Moving movies, movies that are deep, or perhaps depressing. Movies that try to portray the human side of life and, naturally, of its counterpart.

So no surprise that on this trans-Pacific flight I was fixated by My Sister’s Keeper.

The cabin air was dry, but my eyes were not almost throughout the movie. On a tiny screen not much bigger than the display of my camera, I watched the movie as we brushed the skies over Alaska. A simple story, if simplified, about a family living with a dying child with severe leukaemia, and the attempts of a determined mother who has done and continues to strive to do everything she can to save the daughter’s life. Death is cruel and inescapable, and the girl eventually succumbs to fate. Prayers cannot withstand the spread of sickly cells. The world’s best medicine cannot reverse the failure of the kidneys and gradually the poisoning of the blood. And even love, though deep and with miraculous abilities to heal, cannot heal the girl’s terminal illness.

Watching someone struggle and cling onto dear life is difficult. Even more so if it is someone dear, someone close, someone you wish you could give or do anything if only to win one last brief moment with. But ultimately you lose the person. You try to hold your tears, in vain, as you hold onto the person’s still warm hands, and feel, and watch. Watch, powerlessly and unwillingly, as life wanes and fades, as the slightest twitch of the fingers stop.

Watching someone’s eyes grow yellow, head go bald, and arms become frail and thin is unbearable. You are pained and cut deeply by the contrast between images of a time when there was not a worry in the world, when life was filled with good health and happiness. The next moment twisted by the uncertainty and apprehension of going into the cold, sterile environs of the oncology ward. You think of the beautiful memories, lasting and long, repeatedly played over and over again in your mind… of times spent laughing, of childhood and growing up, of the romantic moment sharing a sunset, of silently watching from a distance as the person is peacefully asleep.

And yet, they become so wretchedly contaminated with the realities of death, and dying. How do you let go? How do you let go, but at the same time remind yourself that you will not forget, because if you forget this person dies with your lost memories?

My Sister’s Keeper spoke to me. Personally. But it is also a reminder to everyone of us how fragile life can be, and how easily one can become so caught up with the onslaught of death, whenever it may come. And as sure as the sun will rise, death will come. In the face of death, fear and uncertainty often consumes us. And in the face of someone else’s death, loss, regret and deep, deep sorrow often swallows us.

But it is not the dying that is the end all or be all. And neither is the girl’s death the highlight of the movie— if death could ever be a highlight of anything. It is the first kiss, the hugs before bed, the warmth of being wrapped in your parent’s arms, the uncontrollable outbreaks of smiles and laughter over a family meal, the joy of jumping around in the sand next to roaring waves that matter. It is the in-betweens, the intimate moments, and the shared times captured by a little picture or caught by plain words as they float around with the passage of someone’s lifetime that count, and that are worth remembering.

In those final moments, the girl hands her mother a little scrapbook filled with photographs, scribbles, cut out messages and drawn hearts. Perhaps to leave something behind in this world, and in the lives of others she has come across. Or perhaps to tell her mother that death is not necessarily the end.