40 pages • 1 hour read
Jenny DownhamBefore I Die
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Female Rebellion
Although family and community are central in this book, its view of marriage and traditional heterosexual courtship is more skeptical. Tessa’s best friend Zoey, her boyfriend’s mother Sally, and Tessa’s own mother struggle with the limits placed on women’s lives. They chafe at the roles that are required of them, ultimately finding a balance between the pull of love and their desire for independence.
Tessa’s mother and Zoey are on the surface similarly wayward characters. They are both independent, risk-taking loners, sexually and otherwise. Tessa’s mother comes from a wealthy family, and she seems to view her relationship with Tessa’s working-class father as just an adventure. She left the family for another man when Tessa was 12; she then left this man for a series of menial jobs in exotic places. Despite the fact that since Tessa’s illness, her mother has provisionally settled down, Tessa senses that this outward domestication—moving into an apartment nearby and rekindling a romance with Tessa’s father—will not last. Tessa’s mother is an inherently flighty character whose has great difficulty forming lasting ties even with her own family.
Zoey, on the other hand, wants to find a way to settle down. Her rebellious promiscuity has its roots in her cold and unloving family. Her unplanned pregnancy results in her immediate abandonment: Her parents immediately disown her when they find out; likewise, Scott, the father of her child, dumps her, giving her money for an abortion. Zoey’s decision to keep her baby both signals her increased maturity and stability and is her most rebellious act: She goes against the expectations of everyone around her. In the end, she rejects her party girl image, which has been a constricting and exhausting feminine role.
Like Zoey and Tessa’s mom, Adam’s mom Sally has been let down by her romantic partner—her marriage is stormy, ending when Adam’s father storms out after a fight and dies in a car accident. But unlike the other women in the novel, grieving widow Sally is unmoored and isolated by this sudden and unpredictable uncoupling. While Adam does his best to look after Sally, she needs Tessa’s family to pull her back into the world and to come back to her sense of herself as a woman outside of her role as wife and mother. Ultimately, Sally escapes her downward spiral and flourishes.
Grieving versus Caretaking
Tessa’s terminal illness is tragic, and her eventual death extremely premature. At the same time, because she has been an invalid for years, her illness has hung like a cloud over her family. Coping with her illness is fatiguing and often exasperating for both her and her caregivers. Their grief and anger over the unfairness of what is happening often gets lost in the tedium of caring for her—and in dealing with Tessa’s own grief and anger.
Tessa has incurable leukemia, but she is also a dramatic and shortsighted teenager; it is often hard to tell which of her actions stem from the psychological effects of her condition and which are guided by standard teenage impulsiveness. She sneaks out of her house, shoplifts, and generally misbehaves; she is rudest to those people, like her father, who are the most devoted to her. It is hard to tell whether these actions are a protest against her illness, or whether she uses her illness as an excuse for her bad behavior. Upon being caught shoplifting at a local supermarket, she is shocked when her female interrogator is unsympathetic to the information that Tessa has leukemia. Later, Zoey accuses Tessa of “liking being sick”; when her younger brother Cal later asks her if this is true, Tessa answers honestly, “Sometimes” (71).
As Tessa grows frailer, her family tolerates more of her outbursts, which are now clearly justified expressions of anger and hopelessness when she no longer has the strength to misbehave. At the same time, her outbursts also remind her family of Tessa’s old defiance. Her family’s newfound acceptance of her at these times is an expression of love and mourning. When Tessa throws a destructive temper tantrum in her bedroom after her boyfriend Adam has gone to interview at a university, her father calls her a “monster” (271), but then begins to cry. While he is exhausted at the ongoing challenge of parenting Tessa, he also dreads the day this challenge ends.
Improvised Families
On her deathbed, Tessa is surrounded by her nuclear family, and by friends who form a kind of chosen community after fleeing their fractious families of origin. The ironic upside of Tessa’s illness has been unifying this group of people who would otherwise not have known one another with lifelong bonds.
Traditional nuclear families in this book are flawed and disappointing. Tessa’s family broke when her mother left the family when Tessa was 12 years old. She had married Tessa’s father impulsively, in an effort to escape her straitlaced, privileged upbringing; she is now only a peripheral presence in Tessa’s life. The family of Tessa’s friend Zoey is also deeply dysfunctional, as is the family of her boyfriend Adam. Zoey’s parents are both neglectful and controlling: Although they seem not to supervise her in any way, they kick her out of the house upon learning that she is pregnant. Adam is encumbered by his mother Sally, who is ghostly and reclusive because of her depression and widowhood, haunted both by the death of her husband and the failure of their marriage.
Tessa brings these disparate strays together on Christmas Day family dinner. Adam brings his mother, whose isolation gradually thaws. Zoey later shows up on their doorstep, announcing that she intends to keep her baby and that she is, for the moment, homeless—a heavily symbolic set of circumstances parallel the Biblical story of the birth of Jesus. The motley group unites out of choice rather than social pressure. As Tessa’s condition deteriorates, they grow more and more emotionally entwined. Adam largely moves in with Tessa since Sally can now navigate her life by herself. Zoey joins a support group for teenage mothers, frequently visiting Tessa’s family, which has become a substitute for her own.
Tessa’s own parents tentatively reconcile, drawn back together out of mutual grief and escapism, but their bond seems less sturdy than the other bonds in Tessa’s community. Their partnership remains unequal: Tessa’s father needs her mother more she him; at the same time, he continues to do the bulk of Tessa’s caretaking. As a pair, they probably won’t last. However, as part a group of people brought together by Tessa’s fate, they will never lose their connection. Tessa’s found community absorbs failings and differences in a way that a single marriage cannot.
