My Fathers Brain 5.1

“My Fathers Brain” by Jonathan Franzen is both a technical and emotional piece. Alzheimer’s disease affects many people each year, it tears families’ hearts apart. This disease destroys the patient’s memory and mental stability. People diagnosed with Alzheimer’s forget peoples names, including family members and it makes them oblivious to their actions and surroundings.
Franzen’s father Earl was the typical working dad that expected to come home to a meal on the table. Earl wasn’t really the lovey dovey type of person, Franzen actually said “My parents’ marriage was, it’s safe to say, less than happy. They stayed together for the sake of their children and for want of hope that divorce would make them any happier”. Earl had a “narrative interest in life” he loved to watch the news and know what was going on at all times. After Earl retired he became very unhappy and Franzen’s mother thought it was because of her “It is very hard living with a person when you know you must be the major cause of unhappiness” said Earl’s wife.




In 1990 Franzen’s mother wrote a letter to him regarding her concerns for Earl, “Either he’s stressed or not concentrating or having some mental deterioration but there have been quite a few incidents recently that really worry me. He keeps leaving the car door open or the lights on & twice in one week we had to call triple A & have them come out & charge the battery (now I’ve posted signs in the garage & that seems to have helped)…. I really don’t like the idea of leaving him in the house alone for more than a short while”.
“There had been a weekend with my Uncle Erv in Indiana, where my father, removed from his familiar surroundings, unleashed a night of madness that culminated in my uncle’s shouting into his face , “Earl, my God, it’s your brother, Erv, we slept in the same bed!””. This is some proof that Earl is really starting to become sick. He is now forgetting family members and also just the simple things that you and I don’t even think about but do on a regular basis.
“While the average human life span remained low and old age was a comparative rarity, senility was considered a natural by-product of aging…perhaps the result of sclerotic cerebral arteries.” I like this quote quite a bit because it is showing that our world is becoming more reliable on medical reasoning than just the way of life.


Jonathan’s mother, I think, finally started to accept the fact that Earl was ill and that he was not getting better because she started to take him with her to do the simplest of chores such as grocery shopping. “And so, my father’s “long illness” was a crushing strain and disappointment to her, it was also an opportunity to grow slowly into an autonomy she’d never been allowed: to settle some very old scores.”
Human will is the main topic in this story. This entire voyage of Earl’s life as a downward spiral was taken with a grain of salt by Jonathan and his mother. They had to sit in his room or be with him at almost all times because of fear for his safety, which was helpful mainly to Earl because they never received a thank you. Until Earl had said to Jonathan “Thank you for coming. I appreciate your taking the time to see me”.
Franzen shows how hard this disease actually hit his father when he talked about the time that they took him out of the nursing home and took him home for Thanksgiving. He said that most of the evening was Alzheimer’s but the most powerful part of this story for me was when they had got back to the nursing home and Earl said “better not to leave than have to come back”.
Earl was a very stubborn old man and very strong willed. Even through all of his sickness and now on his death bed Earl still had the pride inside of himself to not die in front of his son. I think he saw it as a sign of weakness and he didn’t want his family to think that he was weak.

This statement by Jonathan was one of the most emotional of the story for me, “I leaned over my father, who smelled faintly of acetic acid but was otherwise clean and warm. Identifying myself, I told him that whatever he needed to do now was fine by me, he should let go and do it”. That to me was true love for his father, being able to see that he was embarrassed to die and show weakness and essentially telling him that he has nothing more to prove.
“After we had kissed him goodbye and signed the forms that authorized the brain autopsy, my mother sat down in our kitchen and uncharacteristically accepted my offer of undiluted Jack Daniel’s. “I see now” she said. “That when you’re dead you’re really dead.” This true enough. But, in the slow-motion way of Alzheimer’s, my father wasn’t much deader now than he’d been two hours or two weeks or two months ago. We’d simply lost the last of the parts out of which we could fashion a living whole. There would be no new memories of him. The only stories we could tell now were the ones we already had”. This was the last paragraph in the story and it truly shows that maybe the act of being a caretaker could be harder than being the actual patient, and also the strength of “human will” and how it can help a person get through anything that they encounter.