My Fathers Brain What Alzheimer's Takes Away Analysis

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Recently I read the story “My Fathers Brain What Alzheimer’s Takes Away” by Jonathan Franzen in my English 101 course. In this story Jonathan Franzen speaks about his parent’s relationship before and after Alzheimer’s, how he viewed Alzheimer’s affecting their lives and his feelings towards his father’s death. Franzen also often illustrates his mothers struggle to deal with his father’s disease and the many emotions attached to it. He talks about how his father started to forget different things which eventually turned into forgetting many everyday things. Franzen explained that his father got lost in his own neighborhood in one instance and couldn’t remember his own children’s birthdays another. As I read through this story, it started to…show more content…
I already knew that it was a disease that had to do with memory loss, but to answer anything I need to first look the base of everything, Alzheimer’s disease. A German physician named Alois Alzheimer first discovered Alzheimer’s in a suffering patient named Auguste D in 1906. Alzheimer’s is known to be a progressive and fatal brain disease that destroys brain cells which explains the memory loss and other behavior that comes with it. These cells are killed by things called plaques and tangles. Plaques and tangles are believed to block communications to nerve cells which result in them dying. ("What is Alzheimer's?" Alzheimer's Association) After I read that I was kind of confused as to what the difference is between dementia and Alzheimer’s. I looked through this site some more to find out. I found that dementia is just any memory loss or mental disability that interferes with ones everyday life. This just means that Alzheimer’s is just a severe form of dementia. I also discovered that Alzheimer’s accounts for up to 50 to 70 percent of cases of dementia. Franzen states, “I remember my suspicion and annoyance, fifteen years ago, when the term Alzheimer’s disease was first achieving currency. It seemed to me another instance of the medicalization of human experience, the latest entry into the ever-expanding nomenclature of victimhood.” (p.89) When he said that, I started to wonder when it went from being…show more content…
Franzen also goes on to later say “I don’t like to remember how impatient I was for my father’s breathing to stop, how ready to be free of him I was.” (pg 98) I was surprised to find that he would say something like that about the man that was part of giving him life. I started to think more about a deeper reason for him to have said that and I started to think it was because he really loved his father. Franzen didn’t want to see his father suffer through this horrible disease anymore, so he wanted it to just be over for his father’s own sake. I personally would never want to see a loved one suffer the way Franzen had to watch his father. It would be a hard thing that I don’t know if I ever could go

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