garrison beau scott

Holding on. We all do it. Something, a moment in time, is so perfect, so rare, that letting go is difficult.

It’s three in the morning or so. August 9th. I’m waiting for one of those golden moments when two lives intertwine for the last time. A father tells his son all the things he’s been holding onto, and the son hears all the things he needs to. The kind of things said when patriarchy is handed down.

It is easy for me to reminisce on a childhood full of sweet memories. And it should be said that we all owe my mother a good deal of the credit for them because she’s the one who paved their way with her own sacrifices. But they are memories none-the-less and in them it’s my father who is the hero. It was my father, the SWAT sniper, with a gun in the desert hitting everything bulls-eye. My father running by my side for as long as he could, urging me to run faster, to pass the next guy in front of me. It was my father always meeting me at the finish line. My father in his cop car, rolling into the little league parking lot and catching my game from right field. My father’s lap from where I first drove a car, my father’s cold can of Coors from where I took my first sip.

And it was my father’s beaten, exhausted and worthless body that remained there in the hospital bed. My initial reaction was shock, that this emaciated, white-haired, tube infested man was my father. Badly bruised, near comatose, and severely jaundiced, had I come across him in the hallway, I’d have been hard-pressed to recognize him as my dad. After the shock wore off, my next emotion, and the one I’d have for the majority of my two-day vigil, was that of frustration. At first it was aimed at my father, beginning when I was packing my bag for the trip out.

A few years back, my father had a lung transplant. Prior to that he had trouble breathing with oxygen tubes. Just eating was a chore for him, forget running by anyone’s side. Whenever I visited him, I’d follow him room to room, trying not to step on the long tube that would snake through the house. We’d look at porn on the internet, most of it military. Video taken in night scope mode of a rocket blowing up a terrorist camp, or the grisly effect of a sniper’s bullet. I’d then show him how to do something in Photoshop, and maybe change a light bulb or take down a box from a high shelf.

After the transplant and the subsequent freedom of not being tied to an oxygen tank, my father’s life took a dramatic, albeit short-lived, turn for the best. The way he talked about this new chance and the idea that someone had to die for the transplant to have been possible, I figured he had turned a corner and would fully take advantage of this new opportunity to live. It would be a life of medications, steroids, side-effects and more pharmaceuticals, but it would be a life. And it would be his. However, because it was his, and despite the warnings and common sense directives, he was going to live it on his terms. And it was this refusal to live by any other rules other than his own that would steepen his line of descent into the hospital bed.

And that’s what I was frustrated with. That he looked at everything he was being offered, shrugged it off and chose to keep drinking and end up here. Ultimately it was his own fucking fault. And had the roles been reversed, that’s what he’d say to me. But I am not him and so I kept that frustration to myself. It wouldn’t do any good. He was way past a hope for recovery, past any chance of hearing me tell him what shame it was that he’d never meet his grandson, the only one I can pass the patriarchy down to, the only regret I would carry from him dying. And because I am not him, my frustration with him quickly vanished, replaced with something else.

I feel very confident, that had someone ten years earlier, shown my father this particular corner of the hospital and introduced the cast of people who’d walk through and pay their last respects, and had shown him the scenes that would play out during the last 48 hours of his life, that he would have taken out any one of his gorgeous gun-mettle black fire-arms and put a bullet through his head right then and there. Maybe it would have been the pearl handled Colt. But he was forced to live through the indignity of an ugly death, witnessed by some he’d just as soon not see in his weakened condition. My father always had to be in charge, and to be at the mercy of so many, to be laid bare in front of any of us, to be the exact opposite of in-control, probably served a more brutal agent of death than the cirrhosis that put him there in the first place.

There are quite a few moments in my life as his son, that could have become regrets, including the moment that occurred at three or so in the morning, Saturday August 9th. It was just the two of us in the room. His breathing was becoming more and more shallow and I was waiting. Maybe I was asleep, dreaming of summer vacations in Yosemite. He called out for me. I went to his side and he said, “Beau, I want to go home. Take me home.” As much as I wanted, I couldn’t move him. There would be no Hollywood ending, slow-motion vignette of me pushing him in a wheelchair into his own sunset. And it pissed him off. Not the Hollywood thing, but my stubborn refusal to bend to his demand. He was dying but refused to give up his will to control the situation.

Everything about my father’s physical existence had changed, but the look in those muddy eyes of his was unmistakable. I had seen that look many times from the age of four until I was about twenty-four. It came when I forgot to put something back exactly as I found it, when I got a C on my report card, when I clashed with my two younger sisters, when I made him utter the phrase, “How many times have I told you…?” I learned early that it was a bad idea to illicit this look from him when he was exhausted from pulling the graveyard shift or if he’d been drinking.

My father had always drank. Beers out in the garage re-filling ammo or admiring his collection of Randall knives. A few “toddies” at Christmas, enough Seagrams Seven at a certain bar to earn a stool with his name on it and a special glass kept under the register. And late in life, always the tumbler of vodka on ice, even when driving to the bar and grill for a dinner out. Before she left him, my mother had an ability to compartmentalize my father and his various moods and the demands they placed on our family. I would end up doing the same with his drinking.

I tell myself that there are reasons I didn’t see the destruction he was doing. One would think that a second shot at life, a second wife he knew he didn’t deserve, and the second opportunity to raise children with the birth of my half-brothers, that a man would seize that chance to live. I am guilty of giving him too much credit. The reality is I didn’t want to see it.

Had his last moments occurred at any other point in our history, I might not have been there, wouldn’t have cared. As it were, I almost missed it if only because I figured he’d pull through as he had many times prior. It was the helplessness in my step-mother’s voice that signaled a difference though, and I hopped the plane. I have been born and I will die, and there have been times when that was the only thing I had in common with my father. But it wasn’t always like that.

My earliest memories of him begin around age four, hanging out in his darkroom, playing golf with him at the country club, my first plane ride, watching and rooting for the Dallas Cowboys. As father and son we were able to share all of the Norman Rockwell moments, most of which had him with camera in hand. The results were, more often than not, stunning. The body of work he compiled just on our family alone comprises an archive of my childhood, filtered through the moments that reveal only the beauty and peace of life. But that’s what pictures are, a filter to reality.

And the reality was, my father was a hard man. Short of temper, long on discipline, no capacity to suffer fools. Military born and bred, he cherished the codes of hierarchy. He believed in Semper Fi. His expectations on the family were great and woe to us when we failed to meet or worse, ignore them.

There is a picture taken of my mom and dad circa 1962. He is fresh from boot camp, enjoying a day-off on base with his parents. They are having a picnic and dad is sitting on the bench in his uniform. Mom is sitting just to his side, almost behind him. Dad is looking right at the camera with an expression of youth meeting Marine Corp. bravado. Mom is looking at dad with an expression of naive love.

My dad never stopped looking at life in the way he looked at the camera in that picture. Even when the youth of that expression became diluted with life, family, and eventually death. My mom’s expression however, did change. A family’s photo album doesn’t show everything, the camera’s weakness is that it can be selectively shelved. And in-between all the Kodachrome moments were the fits of rage, long stretches of perfected silent treatment, and exasperation that children and wives don’t always fall in line the way soldiers are suppossed to.

The older I got and the more I deviated from the straight line he wanted me to walk, the more force he used trying to keep me within its boundaries. This lasted until I was 18, when to the genuine surprise of us all, my mom left him. In the wake of the divorce, I discovered the family photography archive. The very thing offered me a chance to name my own destiny and then, with time, my father showed me how to fulfill it. I am a photographer because of him. I am a photographer because, like him, I saw the beauty of the moment when someone you love smiles. And like him, I am moved to capture it.

It was when I decided to study photography that we began the arduous process of learning to forgive each other for the failures in how we played our roles of the Norman Rockwell scene. He forgave me for being a long-haired, potentially deviant, lazy underachiever and I forgave him for being a selfish, unyielding, close-minded tyrant. And if a former cop and card-carrying Republican can forgive his son for smoking a little dope, then his son should be able to forgive his father for wanting a drink. Despite it all, a man still deserves to go out on his own terms.

I don’t want to go through the rest of my life angry at a man who gave me so much, and asked for only greatness in return. I choose to miss him instead. And now it’s my job to celebrate him, remember him, and protect him. That extends to the time I spent as his son, too. In the days leading up to the memorial service, I was asked on a number of occasions to provide the pastor with some sort of fond recollection of my father. For one reason or another I never got around to it. I told him I’d put something together and email it to him, but I never did. It wasn’t like I’d just forgotten to do it, just the opposite in fact. Leading up to the service I repeatedly asked myself why I hadn’t sent him something.

During the memorial service, when I heard this man recounting my father’s life and the things that made him who he was, I found it odd to hear memories come from him that only my sisters possessed. I then realized the reason I never gave anything to the pastor. I didn’t want my life, as my father’s son, to be reduced to a snapshot.

I never got that golden moment in the hospital. My father’s last words to me were, “I want to go home, now.” It was hard to get any words out of him in the condition he was in. And the ones that he did utter had to have been severely altered by the morphine. At one point after he called out for me, and I responded by telling him that I was with him, he looked right at me and said, “No you’re not.” But he did tell me he loved me, and responded to me saying that I loved him with, “I know.” My golden moment from my father does exist however, and in fact, there are hundreds, if not thousands of moments I can hold in my hand, look at, and use to remind myself to celebrate the fact that this man, my father, cared enough about my mother, my sisters and me to capture our life and our time together on film.