Dax Shepard wrote an incredible essay devoted to his recently passed away father. Strong words. Excellent narrative.

1. My Father’s Horniness
My father, Dave Robert Shepard Sr., died on either December 30th or
December 31st, depending on what time zone you were in. I received the
call on the 30th at 11:30PM in Los Angeles, but the caller, positioned in
Detroit, was two hours deep into the 31st. He was dead at 62 years old.
Small cell carcinoma was to blame. It originated in the lungs and then
travelled with great speed to all corners of his body.
I had been back to Detroit just six days before and was disappointed I
couldn’t be with him at the actual finish line. We were partners. We had
taken on this cancer project together. He chose me to deal with all the
doctors and creditors and landlords. It was the only project we ever
teamed up on. We never built a tree house or a soap box derby car
together, but you would have never known it by watching us tear through
chemo decisions and radiation plans. We were two great minds with one
single thought: get into the end zone gracefully.
He had noticed a lump in his neck in August. A biopsy was taken and
some chest x-rays. “A mass” was detected on the lungs. Those were his
words to me, “a mass,” which sounded much more like the words of a
doctor than the retired car salesman that he was. He was much more
prone to use the word “fuck,” and I wondered while he was telling me
this news if he realized how serious that word was. Test results from the
“lump,” which turned out to be a swollen lymph node, came back positive
for cancer. It was the phone call you see on TV and in movies. It was
happening to me now, and I found the timing to be exceedingly
inconvenient. In movies, news of this kind seems to always coincide with
a huge hole in the lead character’s schedule. He or she is able to spend
vast amounts of time at the bedside of the loved one, or at a diner having
coffee and pie with estranged family members. This flexible schedule
allows for some high quality catharsis to take place.
I was acting full time on a TV show based in LA when I got the call. He
was in Detroit. On my days off from the TV show I was traveling around

2. the country promoting a movie I had directed. During the month of
August I went to Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, San Diego,
Nashville, Memphis and New York. Compounding all of this was the
recent and incredibly fortuitous news that my wife and I were pregnant
with our first baby. Whoever was writing my life couldn’t figure out
which storyline they wanted to tell, and decided to tell them all at once.
As tends to happen in real life, despite it being inconvenient, it all
worked out. Pockets of time opened up here and there and I was able to
go back to Detroit often. My initial response was to get him to do chemo
in LA. Surely the weather would be better. He wasn’t having it. I then
made a strong push for him to go to Oregon to be with my brother. Nope.
He was staying in Detroit. He had a huge support system of friends there,
and in the end, it was the right decision.
His friends. This is relevant. One of the few upsides of my father being
dead is that I can now break his anonymity and state plainly that he was
a proud member of Alcoholics Anonymous for over 25 years. During that
quarter-of-a-century span, he accumulated the most colorful, caring,
fucked-up group of friends you’d ever want to see. It was a rag-tag band
of misfits bound together only by their shared desire to not get loaded
anymore. What a group. It was truly his greatest accomplishment. They
all loved him in a way that even my brother and I had a hard time doing.
He hadn’t missed any of their birthdays or soccer games, and they saw
only the man who had helped so many struggling folks get sober. They
were by his side, uninterrupted, from diagnosis to death. Often
annoying, but always a blessing, they gave him the greatest gift possible:
their time. He was never alone. Not for one second.
When I visited we would break up the chemo routine with trips to the
cineplex or restaurants of his choosing. He loved to eat. Holy shit could
he eat. Of all of his addictions, and there were many (drugs, alcohol,
cigarettes, sex, cars, houses, shiny things), eating was his number one.
He never did get a handle on that vice. He could hunker down in front of
the TV for hours, nibbling with comma-inducing ferocity the entire time.
Nothing in the pantry was safe. He would come up with the most

3. counter-intuitive combinations of food. Like a true alchemist, he’d put
salsa on oatmeal, or smother frozen waffles with a can of black beans. He
was like a perpetually stoned, pregnant woman. No permutation of
ingredients was out of the question; anything was possible. It was a sight
to behold.
We had a lot of fun together during those four months. We took long car
rides through the back roads of rural Michigan. We spent a weekend
visiting every single house and apartment the two of us had ever lived in.
There were 28 between the two of us. Together we had only shared three
of those places: a single-wide mobile home from 0-1 years-old, a small,
brick ranch on a few acres in the middle of nowhere from 1-3 years-old,
and a modern, middle-class home in a McMansion-ee neighborhood
from 15-16 years-old. It was that gap between 3 and 15 years-old that
caused most of our issues. He was a selfish asshole, and I lived to hold a
grudge, so it was a thoroughly symbiotic pairing. The car rides proved to
be shockingly therapeutic. One of the hidden benefits of cancer is that it
can erode grudges the way WD-40 dissolves rust. It just finds it’s way
into all the nooks and crannies and starts loosening. Before long, the
once formidable chip on my shoulder had melded into something the
size of a nicotine patch. Apologies were exchanged. Tears were had. Hugs
were frequent and lingering. I spent the majority of our time together
running my hand lightly over the tiny little hairs peaking out from the
back of his soft, bald head. He let me do that for hours. Without any
awareness of it at the time, the trips home turned into a proper
Alexander Payne Movie. It became one of the more beautiful experiences
of my life.
Things got worse, as they do. Car rides gave way to hospitals and senior
care facilities. His last two months were spent dealing with cancer, heart
disease and gout. He had an increasingly difficult time walking and spent
most of his time in bed. On my last trip home, just before Christmas, I
took him on his final jailbreak. I threw him in a wheelchair and rolled
him through 20 degree weather to his favorite restaurant, where I
watched him pick at his waffles and bacon. He couldn’t have had more
than four bites over the course of an hour. It was a very clear signal to me

4. that the end was near. I took him, for the last time, to his house. I gave
him his percocet and sat him in front of the TV. He held the remote in his
right hand like a six-shooter, splitting his attention between the TV, the
view of the lake through the sliding glass door, and me. It was wonderful.
We sat that way for over three hours.
I took him back to the hospital right around dinner time. They brought
him a full meal, complete with dessert. He didn’t even touch the dessert.
I never thought I’d see that. I had always imagined he would be chewing
WHILE he died. When the nurse came to get the tray, my father thanked
her and then went straight into his normal schpeel about taking her to
the movies and maybe dancing. These invitations were always laden with
less-than-subtle, yet just-charming-enough, sexual innuendoes. I had
seen this fearless maneuver millions of times since I was a boy. My
brother and I were routinely embarrassed by him at Big Boy’s, where he
would tell female servers they had “nice assets.” We would hide our faces
in shame as he flashed his warm, sincere smile. Shockingly, these gals
often blushed or said something flirty in return. Now, I don’t think that is
a testament to my father’s sex appeal as much as it is an indictment of
Big Boy’s monotonous work environment, but regardless, he did manage
to get away with murder, and that deserves some recognition. And as
hard as it is for my brother and I to accept, he did have a “way with
woman.” He did date, and sometimes even marry, women vastly outside
of his pay grade (said the pot to the kettle).
The next day I showed up to the hospital to find that he had taken a very
sharp turn for the worse. It was not what I was expecting. I had let
myself believe that the fun we had the day before was some kind of magic
antidote. I half expected to see him eating a full breakfast when I walked
in, but instead he was dazed and motionless. He could no longer sit up
on his own, and talking was proving to be too much for him. So we sat
quietly. I climbed in the bed with him and rubbed the little hairs on the
back of his neck. I squeezed him. I’d never seen him so cute and little. He
was a 250 pound baby. We spent most of the day that way.

5. At one point, and unbeknownst to both of us, my wife walked into the
room. She had flown in from LA without any warning. It was a surprise.
It was an amazing, incredible, perfectly timed surprise. She lifted her
shirt up and he put his hand on her swollen stomach. He left it there for
the better part of an hour. He was smiling from ear to ear, sitting
contently, unable to put together a sentence, but still capable of
connecting to the new family member we were creating. He wasn’t going
to make it to the birth, but that didn’t get in the way of him meeting the
new baby. It was an emotional and triumphant moment. One I will never
forget. If I live to be a thousand, I will still be in debt to my wife for
giving him that one last thrill.
But there was still another thrill left to be had. One that is equally
memorable. Just as day was turning into evening, the nurse came in to
assist him with his pee jug. She was manipulating his penis into the
mouth of the jug when he mustered up the strength and focus to say
something pervy into her ear. It was too quiet for me to make out the
whole sentence. I heard snippets of words and then, “…when I get out of
here…” and then more snippets followed by her laughing and giving him
a playful nudge. I couldn’t believe my eyes. He could barely muster a
“hello” when I came in, and here he was waxing poetically to this 20-
something stranger. As she walked away, he was smiling like a teenager
behind the wheel of his first car. My normal reaction would have been to
defend the poor nurse’s right to work in a harassment-free environment,
but on this day, I was just too shocked by the eleventh hour show of
virility. Here was a man, a bona-fide food addict, who had lost his will to
eat. He couldn’t walk, and up until then, had stopped talking. He was
wearing a diaper for Pete’s sake. But here he was, horny as hell and ready
to party. It was his only vital sign still thriving. It was indomitable;
impervious to the suite of diseases ravaging his body.
Witnessing the sheer power of that drive was eye opening. It put a few
historical things into perspective for me. If this force was stronger than
my Dad’s will to walk, talk, use a toilet or EAT, surely it was strong
enough to lead Kennedy, King, Haggard and Clinton into the weeds. This
was some powerful shit we were dealing with here. Putting the moral

6. implications to the side, the strength in and of itself was astonishing. It
almost deserved a round of applause.
I left the following day. I got updates from my uncle on Christmas and
the four days that followed. Each was progressively worse. The light was
getting dimmer and dimmer. He was slowly transitioning to whatever is
next. Through all of those updates, there were no reports of pain,
seizures, or bed sores. Only accounts of gently drifting away. And so it
was, that on December 30th or 31st, we made it pain-free and with grace
into the end zone; a feat that, as I write this, overwhelms me with
gratitude. Our first project together was a total success. My only regret is
that we didn’t take on more together.