Outside Reading #3(the last song)--Meredith Elliott

Over spring break I read Nicholas Sparks’ The Last Song. This book is about a pianist and his relationship with his rebellious teenage daughter. The pianist and his wife divorced many years ago after she was caught cheating on him. However, the daughter has built up this wall to her father because she has believed all these years that her dad cheated on her mom. The daughter now lives with her mother and is being forced to spend the summer with her father in Wilmington, North Carolina. What the daughter doesn’t know is that her dad is terminally ill with cancer and that is why her mother is forcing her to go live with her dad for the summer.
This movie reminded me of the quote “you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone”. I never have quite understood why cancer happens. Although a lot of times the quick response by people is that it could be worse, but how can you tell that to someone who is losing their dad, mom, or any other close friend or family that is dying of cancer? Yes, there are some happy outcomes to cancer stories, but it seems as if there are more bad stories rather than good stories.
I guess some could argue that not everything from the plot was a negative experience; the daughter was able to rekindle a relationship with her father that was built on lies. The only reason for her father lies was to keep her from having a negative image of her mother. In the end she forces her mother to stay with her father until eventually he dies. Before she moved to Wilmington, she knew nearly nothing about her father and even though her father ends up dying at the end, she was able to meet him. If it weren’t for this opportunity, her father would have died with no support from his daughter. Not only that, but she would have never known the truth about her mother and would have realized there really was no reason for not keeping in touch with him all these years. There would have been much more regret if she were to have never gone to Wilmington to become reacquainted with her father. This is just another example of how God works in mysterious ways.