My Father's Brain

5.1: My Father’s Brain

The story, “My Father’s Brain” by Jonathan Frazen is an interesting story that can be interpreted as depressing as well as demeaning. I would say it is depressing because the whole story is the progress of how Jonathan’s father died. Jonathan’s point of view made it seem as if the process of his father’s death started off long and hard on his father and easy for the family; then it became easy on his father and really hard on the family. With his father losing all of his basic knowledge and becoming a figurative one-year-old made the family take it really hard. Demeaning is a word that doesn’t seem like it would fit in the situation of a death rather than fitting well in the situation of a murder. The reason it is a good word is because the author made it seem at the beginning as if seeing his father was a chore; and now that his father was slowly diminishing, he needed to see his father. This made the author’s father’s death demeaning because it humiliated the author to first have to go and then he wanted to go.
The beginning of the recognition that the author’s father has Alzheimer’s was the plea that senility comes with old age. The stereotype that older people are less understanding of basic things was taken into thought. This is how Jonathan’s family all responded to his father becoming senile. They figured it was his old age coming into effect. It was the worst for Jonathan’s mother. His mother was getting blamed for everything by his father, and was getting annoyed. Her attitude towards her husband became unable to compare with. She became unable to handle the verbal abuse anymore so they ended up putting her husband in a home. This is when they realized he had Alzheimer’s.
The brain of someone who has no mental defects or the ‘normal’ brain is much different than the brain of someone with Alzheimer’s. The brain of someone who has Alzheimer’s acts differently because Alzheimer’s first causes some short term memory loss, and then causes long term memory loss. It was troublesome for Jonathan because his father had already struggled with memory, not even being able to remember Jonathan’s birthday. Finding out he had Alzheimer’s made it condonable that he had never been able to remember the author’s birthday. The brain of a normal person obviously has flaws but is over all able to easily obtain a lot of information.
The author seemed as if toward the end of the story he was very broad but yet still very, very emotional, unlike his mother who was very specific and to the point. In his father’s final hours the author showed so much emotion in the direction of his father. He couldn’t understand why his father just wouldn’t pass away but realized his father’s brain was fighting for all it had. His mother and he were talking with the nurse in the doorway of his father’s hospital room and as the power flickered on, he noticed his father draw his hands toward his throat. As he did that, Jonathan cried, “I think something is happening” (98). His mother and he kissed his father goodbye and his mother stated that she understood when you’re dead you’re really dead. Although that seems broad, the meaning of that phrase is that no matter how much someone has diminished, he’s still not gone until he’s fully gone.
Frazen’s father never liked to show weakness, which is why he was always hard on his wife. He found that death was a sign for weakness which is the reason why he was fighting for his life. Mentioned before, the body will do everything in its will power to stay alive, but with the help of the person dying, the body can last that much longer. To Frazen’s father, dying was worse than suffering. Although the suffering for his father was very minimal, the experience that his family underwent was horrible. But to his father, showing that weakness meant exploiting his family’s pain watching him crumble to next to nothing.
The downward trend that the author’s father and his family went through seemed to be a difficult one to go through. His mother throughout her life had been hospitalized over thirty times, yet until he retired, the author’s father had never been in the hospital. Then upon his retirement, his father became senile and had to soon become hospitalized. They found out that his father had Alzheimer’s Disease and the family didn’t really know what to think. Then it spiraled out. His father became worse, but had less suffering, but the family suffered more.
The story of Jonathan Frazen’s father’s brain is not only a process, but it’s a struggle. To get through the pain of the initial disease had to have been hell for Frazen’s father. The pain in the end for Jonathan and his family could have been rated as even worse. The struggle was how to take care of his father because he could have died at any given time. It also became a difficult process because of his father’s lack of recollection. It became so far that he ended up having the intelligence of a one-year-old. Jonathan Frazen felt the need to tell his story because he finally needed to get it off his chest.