Last November, Scott Brown left his Anchorage life of sleeping on the streets, panhandling and cheap vodka to give sobriety one more try.
It would be the last in a lifetime of attempts to shake alcohol.
At 57, he had survived several damaging strokes and was suffering from congestive heart failure brought on, at least in part, by drinking, according to his family. He'd been an alcoholic for 40 years and homeless in Anchorage for the past two.
He was "tired of the whole ball of wax," he said.
With the help of an outreach worker, Brown was given the opportunity to return to his hometown of Sitka for inpatient alcohol rehabilitation.
An Alaska Dispatch News reporter and photographer documented his last days before rehab for a series of stories about homeless alcoholics in Anchorage. Brown hoped his story might help someone trying to make the same leap.
In those last days in Anchorage, shopping for travel clothes with outreach worker Deb Flowerdew and eating a rare full meal at McDonalds, Brown was full of shaky hope.
His mother, longtime Sitka resident Patricia Ridley, was delighted her son was coming home.
"He just said he was sick of being a drunk and living on the streets," she said. "I said, 'it's all long past due and I'm so happy for you.'"
For a time, things seemed to be going dazzlingly well.
Brown completed four months of rehab and stayed sober afterward, moving in with his mother and doing janitorial work at a church.
"I can't believe I'm cleaning God's house," he told her.
For the first time in decades of trying to kick alcohol, he also threw himself into 12-step meetings. He even led some.
Then Brown relapsed.
All it took, his mother says, was for the family cat to go missing.
By the time the cat had turned up, Brown had taken his worry and anxiety and bought a bottle of booze with it.
His sister flew up from Washington while Brown was drinking, promising him that if he sobered up she'd take him fishing, which he did. Being on the water always made him happy.
"Usually by the time a person gets to this stage of alcoholism they've lost everybody," Ridley said. "But his family truly loved him."
In June, about a month and a half after he relapsed, Brown decided to go to Anchorage to see his cardiologist about his worsening heart failure.
Ridley knew Anchorage and alcohol spelled trouble. But her son was 58 years old. She was nearly 80. She couldn't keep hovering over him, she said.
"I knew when he was leaving here things were bad," Ridley said. "In that line at the airport he looked at me five or six times and said, 'I love you, you know. No, I mean I really love you, Mom.'"
He left on June 14.
Ridley doesn't know what happened to Brown in the next four days. She had no way to contact him.
On June 18, Anchorage police found Brown dead in a copse of trees across the street from the Anchorage jail, a hideaway for drinkers between the shelter and the sleep-off center.
"The deceased male was located in a small clearing under a cover of thick brush laying on a piece of cardboard that appeared to be used as a mat," the police report said. "There were no signs of injury or apparent trauma."
His heart gave out, Ridley said. Scott Brown was 58 when he died.
It's impossible to know how much Brown's drinking was related to his heart condition. But Alaska State Medical Examiner Gary Zientek said chronic alcoholism affects the heart in several ways: through hypertension, arrhythmia, loss of cells and congestive heart failure.
The optimism that Brown would find permanent sobriety was probably misplaced, Ridley thinks: You can't change four decades in four months.
"I don't know if there was ever a time that Scott was ever really going to stay sober," she said. "This last time he gave it the best shot he was capable of."
Ridley says her son is at peace.
"I'm not," she said. "Neither are the people who loved him."
But she holds on to those last six good, sober months they had in Sitka together. Looking back, they feel like his gift.