StudentEssayWords

This semester, I am teaching a science-based/laced expository writing class at Hopkins. It's called "Reprogenetics and the American Family," and recently, I assigned a book to my students: My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult.

This book is a fictional account relating to issues that can stem from using one child as a genetic donor for a sibling in the same family. Anna, the novel's main character, was born with one purpose in mind - to be a donor for her older sister Kate, who was diagnosed with terminal leukemia at age 2. In the book, thirteen-year old Anna sues her parents for the rights to her own body - at the risk of losing her sister. The ensuing battle, both within the family and within the courtroom, shakes the concept of family to the very core, and calls into question the term "good parenting."

For all other essays this semester, I've had guided prompts- instructing the students, more or less, on how to enter an argument, develop a thesis, and convey a novel thought. This time around, with My Sister's Keeper, students had free reign. I asked them to touch on the debate about quality versus sanctity of life, and to incorporate outside sources -especially court cases- but every other element of this paper was to be theirs.

Here, I'd like to share a bit of sophomore Lindsay Brown's paper... specifcally, her introduction and the poem she wrote, to preceed it. Lindsay is pre-med. She's also an eloquent writer. Take a peek!

“Ode to a Peaceful Day”

I lie here in your bed of steel,
My arms are straight and taut,
You say you feel and understand,
So, why do you tighten my knot?

The doctor says my heart is weak,
My lungs can barely breathe,
I gasp and moan from pains I feel,
Oh, if only I could leave!

The tube is long, my throat is sore,
My lips are chapped and dry,
I want to talk so I can tell,
But no tears will fill my eye.

It hisses and purrs about my head,
The “machine of life” they say,
My time has come to see the sky,
So let me have my way.

My body’s weak, I want to sleep,
My eyelids feel like lead,
But peace evades my restless soul,
While I remain in this bed.

I hear the angels at my door,
I’m ready to move on,
The tubes and plugs are all removed,
My spirit fades away with the dawn.

*

“Sometimes I hate myself,” Anna murmurs.
“Sometimes,” I tell her, “I hate myself too.”
This surprises her. She looks at me, and then again at the sky again.
“They’re up there. The stars. Even when you can’t see them.”
-Picoult

*

The service-station boy, in his white uniform, seemed uneasy until the bill was paid. He said, “You people sure have got nerve.”
Tom looked up from the map. “What you mean?”
“Well, crossin’ in a jalopy like this.”
“You been acrost?”
“Sure, plenty, but not in no wreck like this.”
Tom said, “If we broke down maybe somebody’d give us a han’.”
“Well, maybe. But folks are kind of scared to stop at night. I’d hate to be doing it. Takes more nerve than I’ve got."
Tom grinned. “It don’t take no never to do somepin when there ain’t nothin’ else you can do. Well, thanks. We’ll move on.”
-Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath

*

In literature, martyrs only come in one size or shape. Anna’s jalopy is a courtroom. Her wreck is her age. Like Tom, she doesn’t waiver, she had no other choice. John Steinbeck’s message in the Grapes of Wrath is no different than Jodi Picoult’s in My Sister’s Keeper. Authors, however, would never let a reader think such an absurdity could possibly be true, and disguise this truth with interplay of words and contexts.
Anna, perhaps in less obvious ways that Sara, clearly stands out as a martyr in Jodi Picoult’s, My Sister’s Keeper. Her going to court, in effect, to end her sister’s life is an ultimate act of love and devotion and a concrete reaction to her sister’s illness and subsequent desire to die. Campbell on the other hand acts as a martyr in leaving Julia. However unfounded his perceived notions about his own illness may have been, he acts, seemingly quite contrarily, to give Julia life. The irony is that in the end, it is Anna who gives Kate life and Campbell who takes a great deal of Julia’s away. Each act of sacrifice is marked by a distinct period of alienation and sadness, but save by this path of darkness may dawn and a period of great quality and sanctity of life be reached.
What happens when martyrdom jumps out of the pages of classics and into the modern world, and is palpable in a U.S. courtroom? How are service station boys, in the form of jury members, able to comprehend and judge the actions of a martyr and, most importantly, at what point the destruction of a period of alienation and sadness is not worth the final rewards?

.MGW.