On August 2, aged 50, Carver died in his home. July brought a lengthy, but fruitless, time in the hospital. He and Gallagher, who married that June, chose not to reveal much about his declining health to friends-few knew the extent that his cancer had spread. By March of 1988, however, he had to begin radiation treatment. He worked on the proofs for what would become his most famous book-the one I was assigned in college- Where I’ m Calling From, which featured new and selected stories, including “Errand.” He gave many readings, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford. He reduced his smoking, and began making more plans for the future.
Surgery, barely a month later, successfully removed the tumor.
This caused him to see a doctor the resulting scans showed a tumor. It wasn’t, for example, until September of 1987, three months after “Errand” appeared in print, that Carver noticed blood in his sputum, the first sign of lung cancer. When I read Sklenicka’s biography, however, I found that the details of Carver’s death did not neatly align with my professor’s claims. During our class discussion of the story, my literature professor appended the information that Carver was dying while he was writing it, and pressed us to read the story biographically, as a fictionalization of Carver’s own death. I first read “Errand” as a college student, and it stuck with me for two decades. Carver and Gallagher had arrived in London the very day “Errand” appeared in print: June 1, 1987. The New Yorker finally published “Errand” just as Carver was about to reach a significant milestone: on June 2, 1977, ten years before, he had taken his last drink. Meanwhile, Carver and Tess Gallagher, the writer Carver had been dating for years, planned two trips to Europe. Carol Sklenicka, in her 2009 biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer’ s Life, wrote that “Errand” required more editing than any of Carver’s previous stories. The magazine’s fact-checkers questioned the historical accuracy of the work and pressed Carver on the sentences where they felt he hewed too closely to English translator Michael Henry Haim’s phrasing. A few months later he sent the manuscript off to Charles McGrath at The New Yorker, where several of his other stories had been published. He discarded multiple titles, including “The Mortician,” before finally settling on “Errand.” The writing was slow. Before finishing the book, he began working on a short story about Anton Chekhov’s death, intertwining elements from Troyat’s biography with his own invention. Carver, whether he knew it or not, was near the end of his life. Not long after Henri Troyat’s 1984 biography, Chekhov, was translated to English in 1986, it found its way into the hands of Raymond Carver.
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