Surviving

Jen's family has a rough time making it through the ordeal of Wallace's brain tumor. They do not know if he is going to live through it and feel as though they could hardly survive if he died. They and their friends keep trying to find some sort of meaning in it all, wanting a reason why such a kind, generous man would develop such a condition. While Jen is trying to deal with it, she often thinks about the various problems her friends have been through that they survived. Her friend Kathleen's parents both committed suicide when Kathleen was a teenager, and Kathleen then made it through an abusive marriage and then a divorce. Jen has known many people who committed suicide or who suffered horrible abuse as children or who dealt with some deadly disease. At the end of the book, Jen's father puts together a...