Relating to Scott Russell Sanders' Essay Under the Influence, Paying the Price of My Father's Booze

I can still remember the day, June 2, 2013, my cousin took his own life due to alcohol. This is not the first time alcoholism has taken a family member from my family. I lost my uncle ten years ago to the same things, but running his truck into a tree. Like Scott Russell Sanders’ my family has suffered from the pain and disease that alcohol causes. Although Sanders’ case was much different than mine, my families is more unknown until all of a sudden one of my family members is gone. In Sanders’ essay, “Under the Influence: Paying the Price of my Father’s Booze,” he discusses how it was growing up around him, his father’s life being taken, and his life now.

Sanders’ was a young boy when his father became an alcoholic. He recalls going into the shed and finding bottles of all kinds of different type of alcoholic beverage that his father was trying to hide from them. He talks about how he remembers his father pulling into the drive and stopping with whatever they were doing to watch him stumble by barley making it to the front door, he remembers his dad and mom getting into fights where he heard his mom crying horrifically from the words that her husband had said to her. “Eventually he wakes with a grunt, Mother slings accusations at him, he snarls back, she yells, he growls, their voices clashing” (182). Sanders’ dad would never hit his wife or Sanders. Sanders’ would try anything he could to help his dad not drink. Whenever they would go to the gas station he would try and go everywhere his father went to make sure he did not buy anything to get drunk off of. His dad knew what he was up to, he would cuss at them to stay in the car or he would hit him. His father never hit him however, he always threatened though. Sand...

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...e Sanders’, trying to prove to his or herself that they can to be perfect the way they think their parents would have been happy with them and not have became an alcoholic.

As I read “Under the Influence: Paying the Price of My Father’s Booze” over and over again I began to realize that my cousin and my family fall into the same situation as Sanders’ did. The essay made me realize that my family is not the only one who has to face this difficulty throughout my whole life. Even though I am not twenty-one yet I know that I am not going to abuse alcohol the way that some people can because I know it can have a different effect on my body and mind unlike some people. I feel the same pain that Sanders’ has gone through losing his father to alcohol. There is always a part of me that wishes I could talk to my cousin and uncle and just ask them why, why did they do it?