My father, an artist, a Christian and an alcoholic, died when he was just 57 years old.

At the moment his heart stopped, he was reading the Bible and my brother and I were with him, but only in a sense of physical proximity. There were years of distance, experience and separation between us. We were not in the same place.

According to the paperwork from the county, he died of a heart attack provoked by asthma brought about by smoking. I’m no doctor, but anyone who knew Richard Sevigny would tell you it was actually a lifetime of excess catching up with him, and I agree.

Scotch whiskey, LSD, marijuana, cocaine.

There was nothing my father wouldn’t try once, twice, 100 times. One time he said that he didn’t feel he was in control of his mind, body or spirit unless he was consuming some kind of drug. And if his wealthy parents had not paid the rent on the studio he also lived in, he might have ended up like the drunks in this photograph I took in San Salvador.

In the Bible, after the Last Supper, Jesus and all his self-interested sycophants — sorry, disciples — are in the Garden. This is right before Judas comes, all dressed in yellow, and stabs the guy in the back with a kiss on the cheek. And Jesus is absolutely agonizing. He says, not once, but twice, but three times, Father, if you can’t take this cup from me — by which he meant the torture of the passion and the crucifixion —then may your will be done.

He looked around, and after all the drinking at the Last Supper, and a long night on the run from the law, his loyal followers had all passed out on the lawn. He was alone, completely alone, and even though my brother and I were there when my father died, we had abandoned him the same way.

My father was dying and we didn’t know it.

At two or three am, he begged my brother, a sworn atheist, to come and pray with him. I knew what the response would be. It was something to the effect of, Go to hell. Ironic given that my brother doesn’t believe in Hell.

A few minutes later, my father called my name.

“John.”

Yeah Dad, I answered.

Would you consider coming to pray and sleep next to me?

No. Go back to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning, I said.

Morning would be too late. My father would be dead, but only after many hours contemplating his god, at the worst moment in his life, filled with fear and the icy chill of the desert as it settled into the garden, begging God to take the cup from his hands.

My father was no Christ. But when I turned the corner in San Salvador and saw these men passed out, I thought of the moments before dawn, on that August 31, when my father died. The picture came to me. I was walking, I turned a corner, and it was there. But it contains far more than it reveals at a glance. It is filled with condemnation, guilt, love, and deep, pangs of regret.

The difference was that during that critical moment for the three of us, my brother and I were the irresponsible, selfish, drunken disciples - though we didn’t drink at all - and my father was set to give up the ghost. He was another lamb of god, ignored and betrayed not in a garden, but in a dirty warehouse studio in South Miami, where his two sons who’d come to take care of him during his illness, denied him, not once, but twice, and have to live with it still.