My Sister's Keeper

21

trigger warning: this gets a little mature towards the end for minor scenes of sexual assault. read at your own risk.

There are five stages of grief. They go like this: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. We go through these stages when we lose someone to death or to life's challenges. After grief, however, comes forgiveness. You need to forgive your person for leaving you too soon in the dust. The stages of forgiveness go something like this: stage one is anger. You're incredibly angry with them for leaving you alone with no one to support you. And you have every right to be. Scream in an empty field, punch a bag, growl at everyone and everything. Stage two is sadness. Cry openly. Express how you feel. Don't hold it in. Let it all go from inside of you. Stage three: the hopeful stage. Hoping they'll forgive you, come back to you, and love you. This is most likely the most painful stage as it puts a load on you mentally. Stage four is the reckoning. Accepting what happened, being okay with the outcome, and looking forward instead of back. The main point here is that forgiveness is a lot like grief. It has stages. It takes time. You can't skip steps. You can't wish away what happened. You have to accept it and move on. And you have to forgive them in order to do that, even if it seems impossible. Forgiveness affects not only the perpetrator but also the other party. They need to forgive to move on. They need to exhale the deep breathe they've been holding, unclench their fists, and let go.

"Thanks so much for watching them, Addison. Considering it was my kid and Alex's..."

"Meredith. It wasn't a problem at all. But if you don't mind my saying, both of those kids need you. They need someone to tell them that they're worth it. Amber spent a lot of time with my best friend, the psychiatrist at the practice, while she was here. And she just needs someone to be there, cause I don't think she feels that there is."

Meredith took this in, not really registering it in her mind. She would ponder it later when she wasn't sitting in the airport line waiting for her runaways to emerge from the terminal.

-

"Mer!"

The first thing she does is hug her aunt. The girl was letting herself be eaten alive by guilt at that point. She felt absolutely awful about everything that had happened. Amelia had rejected her, her father had rejected her...

"Hey, kid," Mer responded, giving her kid a tight hug. Addison had told her that things hadn't gone exactly well with Amelia. She didn't know what she was expecting. And Webber, ever her father figure, had told her to forgive. Because forgiving is not just for the person who did the action, it's for the person who suffered it as well.

She forgave Amelia. She was willing to let her come back to the house. Well, she was until she hurt Cassie. Now she wasn't sure.

"Where is Alex?" Amber asked, scanning the area around them at the airport. It was just Meredith. She was walking, which was great, but Amber needed to talk to her brother.

"Working. He moved his surgery to now so he could spend more time with you later."

"Okay." Amber murmured. It was then that it hit Meredith. Her conversation with Addison on the phone earlier suddenly made sense.

-

Once they got back to the house, Meredith called out to Amber before she could run up the stairs and hide in the attic with Cassie. Amber rolled her eyes, dropped her bag at the stairs, and trudged over to where Meredith was standing at the kitchen counter. She raised an eyebrow. 'What do you want?' her face spoke.

Meredith didn't hesitate. "I get you. You know why I get you? Because I was you. I was the girl who used to sulk around because my father left to have Cassie's mom and aunt, and my mother was too busy being a surgeon to raise me. And you know what, even though my mother cared more about her job than she did about me, she was still around. She was still the person that I wanted to become when I got older. I mean, not the abandoning mother, but the kickass surgeon that won two Harper Averys. Your mother isn't mentally well. I get that. My mom didn't want me to tell anyone that she had deteriorated from Alzheimer's. I didn't think I'd ever find someone to share my life with or even find someone to call family." She turned to look at the pictures stuck on the fridge. Her three kids. Her and Derek and Zola and Bailey. Her and Lexie (Cassie had put that one up there the minute she saw it), and her and the whole doctor family at one of the dinner receptions they had gone to. She needed some pictures of Cassie and Amber to put up there.