What Broke My Father's Heart by Katy Butler

http://www.improveiq.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/brain-lifts-weights.jpg 

This photo describes how the father's brain in the story continued to fight and grow stronger but eventually had to surrender. In the meantime, the heart outlived the brain because of a pacemaker. The brain could not uphold the weight it was enduring.

What Broke My Father’s Heart by Katy Butler is about a girl whose father was severely ill for many years, leaving the mother a full-time job to care for her husband. This ongoing job broke the mother into pieces and turned her life upside down. The narrator saw how this job drained her mother physically and mentally. The author, Katy Butler, is a journalist with work published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Best American Science Writing, and Best Buddhist Writing. This essay was written because of the father being sick and the hardships the narrator and her family endured. Because this topic requires maturity and full understanding of the difficult times of sickness, the audience targeted is older high school kids and ages above. It is hard to truly understand the depth of sickness and the toll it can take on a family, unless one is of the mature age in which one can understand easier. The point the author is trying to get across is that sometimes in life it is easier to let a person go than drag out their life and make multiple people suffer. It is torturous for the patient to go through multiple operations, take medications, and still be in pain when there is never a definite answer if the patient will get better or not. It is torturous for the family to care for the loved one all hours of the day, watch them suffer, and not know what is going to come next. Medical expenses go through the roof and finances become hard to manage. Even though it would be difficult to let a loved one go, it is even harder to continue the suffering, and it would be easier to halt the torture when it begins. A rhetorical device used to get this point across is pathos, so the audience can relate to the hardships the family is going through. Another device used is plenty of detail in the diction, so the reader can visualize the story better. I believe the author did achieve her purpose. Because of the multiple accounts of pathos used, I was able to relate and feel for the characters in the story. The visualization helped me imagine the family and understand their story better. What Broke My Father’s Heart is a story that all people of age should read to understand the toll of sickness.