"My Father's Life" by Ray Carver

“My Father’s Life” is about the author’s father’s life through the author’s perspective. His father is described as a hard worker who constantly hit hard times. He had difficulty holding onto money, and he was an alcoholic. The family was also abusive to one another. One night Carver’s father tried to enter their house drunk. To keep him out, his mother knocked him out with a colander. His father’s main redeeming quality was his devotion to hard work, but ironically his work was what killed him: he became sick from cutting himself on a saw. After Carver’s father's death, we see that despite his toxic tendencies, those around him loved him.
In my senior year of high school I had to read a fair number of Raymond Carver’s short stories. I rarely related to the characters in his stories, who were, to my mind, depressing. It is clear that some of Carver’s inspiration for his characters came from his father’s abusiveness and his mother’s willingness to stay with circumstances as they were. Nevertheless, I do relate to “My Father’s Life”. My half sister, Jenna, led a fairly destructive lifestyle. One of her issues was her tendency to overspend money when she came upon it, and she often found herself with none when she truly needed it. When she was at a good point in her life, her pride took the form of many phone calls to family members, but when she was struggling, she’d stop calling. After she was diagnosed with diabetes, on top of other health problems, my family hadn’t heard much from her in a while. Eventually we received a phone call from her landlord that she had died from a diabetic coma. Her lack of money left her unable to take care of herself, but she had been too ashamed to ask for help. At my sister’s funeral my family and I mourned Jenna’s life. Despite her destructive life style, that day we remembered her for the love we had for her and for her kindness.