Dax Shepard: Grief, Fatherhood, and Friendship

Welcome to All There Is, wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. My guest on the podcast today is Dax Shepard, host of the podcast Armchair Expert. He's also an actor and a writer. I spoke with Dax a couple weeks ago in New Orleans at BookFest, which is an annual event at Tulane University where dozens of authors come and speak. I'm still going through boxes of things in my basement that belong to my mom and my dad and my brother. And the other day I came across some grainy pictures of me on a trip to New Orleans with my dad. There was one taken in a photo store on or near Bourbon Street, one of those places where you dress up in costumes. All the others are from a cheap Instamatic camera I had. That's why the pictures are so grainy. But seeing them brought back the memory of that trip, wandering around the French Quarter in an old cemetery with its above-ground tombs. I remember the way my dad made me feel. I remember his love and the way he treated me as a person worth listening to and worth including in on everything. I hope that's how I can make my boys feel. The photos on the back all have the date that they were processed, July 1977, which means I had just turned 10 on that trip. And in less than six months, my dad would be dead. When Dax and I sat down in front of an audience at BookFest, I talked with him about his dad who died in 2012 and also about his friend Eric Dane, the actor who died last month after a 10-month battle with ALS. We'll have that conversation in a moment. Before we get into the show, here's something worth your time. Every day, animals across the country face abuse, neglect, and cruelty. And every day, the ASPCA shows up. They rescue animals in crisis and provide life-saving medical care. They help animals recover, and they give them the second chance they deserve. But they can't do it alone. Every rescue, every medical treatment, every safe place to heal depends on people who choose to help. If you'd like to be part of that work, visit ASPCA.org slash need. Become a monthly donor today, and you'll help support these life-saving rescue efforts and provide the care, shelter, and love these animals urgently need. And for a limited time, the ASPCA will send you a free gift as a special thank you. Again, that's ASPCA.org slash need. Welcome back. As I mentioned, I spoke with Dax Shepard a couple weeks ago at Tulane University during New Orleans Book Fest. It was a moving and at times funny conversation, and I wanted you to hear it. We were talking in a large auditorium in front of hundreds of people, so the audio and the video is different than we normally have, but I really enjoyed the conversation. And I hope you will, too. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Anderson. It wasn't until last night when I was going to bed that I read the program, and it says that our exchange will balance humor and humanity while offering attendees a resonant, compassionate look at one of life's most universal experiences. Easy lift. I mean, I think that sets the bar kind of high. No problem. Yeah. We'll throw in some stock tips, too. To me, New Orleans is so much a city of memory. And it's very much, I think, for me, a city associated with Hurricane Katrina. I spent about six weeks here during the storm and afterward. Every time I come here, I mean, I'm staying near the convention center where Ethel Freeman, who was 91 years old, I don't know if anybody in this room remembers that name. Ethel Freeman was the only person to die at the convention center. Her son, Herbert Freeman Jr., was told to put a blanket over her head and wield her pillow. She was left there. Her body went unidentified for a long time in the morgue. Jerry Peters was found on the roof of a car in the Ninth Ward. I went by him on a boat and for years never knew his name and only a few years ago learned who he was. The Bain family, who died, drowned in their living room in Waveland, Mississippi, a mother and father and their two kids. So for me, this city is very much kind of associated with loss and with memory. And I love how New Orleans honors the memory of things. My dad went to Francis T. Nichols School here, which is now the Booker T. Washington Academy. New Orleans kind of layers memory on top of memory. But I think grief is something that we just don't talk about very much and yet everybody in this room has lost somebody. Or if you haven't, you sadly will. And yet we as a society are not comfortable talking about it and we're not encouraged to. Yeah, I remember reading this incredible book on killing, and it talked about how separated we've become from death. A hundred years ago, you processed animals that you were farming. Grandma and Grandpa died in the home. You probably buried them in the backyard. Everything's been so removed that we have no real connection to it anymore. And in that kind of loss of experience, I think we start abstracting things and getting quite confused by them. You lost your dad, Dave Robert Shepard. Can you talk a little bit about the experience? You were able to spend time with him at the end of his life. He really wasn't there for you much during the beginning of your life. Yeah, my mom and dad got divorced when I was three. My dad was a very large and gregarious man. He was a car salesman, and he was also an addict. And so we would go see him every other weekend, and that generally meant he would take us directly to my grandparents' house. Which was great, 'cause they were wonderful. So, yeah, I had kind of limited time with him. And my brother, who's five years older than me, he was eight when they got divorced. So he had great memories of riding motorcycles with my father and everything. I didn't really have any, so I didn't pine for him. I didn't want them to get back together the way divorced children sometimes do. And I was quite judgmental of him. We lived very, very modestly, and he drove a Corvette. We had two children, and he would pick us up. That's a two-seater for people who don't know about Corvettes. They're not built for a family, as it turns out. Nor was he. No, no. And if you think it's bad transporting them in a two-seater, drinking doesn't help the situation a ton, nor the snowy roads in Michigan. But alas, yeah, I was pretty judgmental of him, and he got sober. He got sober when I was about 14. Things started changing a bit then. He got in this horrendous car accident when I was 15, and I moved in with him for a couple years. And that was probably the core of our relationship going forward. In my judgment of him, I also, I think, I kind of prided myself on being the one person who wasn't afraid to confront him. All through my 20s, we had moments of real connection, and then moments of us arguing and not talking for periods of time. All this to say that when he got diagnosed with cancer, ironically, I was in a position, financially and time-wise, to be able to go back to Detroit nonstop and be a part of taking him to chemo and doing all the things that need doing. And it's also relevant that I had been supporting him at that point for probably five or six years. And you and I talked last night about the strain of that when your parent's caregiver, every time the phone rings, there's this anxiety of like, well, what is this? What is it now? What problem do I have to solve? So that's how I went into it. I'm insanely grateful for that three-month experience. I went home almost every weekend, and a lot of things were resolved during that time. Maybe most poignantly is he is this man who was larger than life and I was so judgmental of. But he was reduced to wearing diapers, you know? And I changed those diapers. And that was a bit of a blessing to see him infantilized, because I was able to go, oh, yeah, he's just a little boy like all of us. You wrote about it in a blog. You said, "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 its 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 peeking out from the back of his soft bald head. He let me do that for hours. It became one of the more beautiful experiences of my life." Oh, I wasn't expecting that. Yeah, he had the cutest little hairs on the back of his head. Yeah, I think the most poignant moment for us was we were -- I was photographing this welfare apartments that my brother and my mom and I moved into immediately after the divorce, and we were in the parking lot and I was taking a picture. And he just out of nowhere said, he goes, "Yeah, I remember I had to bring a couch over to the house. Your mom wanted a couch, and I pulled out of this parking lot, and I couldn't make it through that light. I was crying so hard I couldn't see, and I pulled over. And I just sat there crying thinking I'm driving away from my life, and I didn't think until that moment he gave a shit." We laughed, and he was like, "Party time, let's get a vet and go to the bar." I hadn't made any room for that, that he had, that that had been a painful experience for him. - Do you feel grief still? - Oh, I've had the, I've had waves of grief. When he initially died, let's say like the first couple months after he had died, I felt relief. I felt unburdened. I wasn't, I didn't have someone to take care of. I didn't have to go home. And then I felt this real shame of feeling relief that he was dead. I guess I had this fear. It was going to get really, really ugly and it didn't get ugly. And I had some gratitude about that. He kind of passed peacefully and quickly. Then I wrote this thing. I really didn't know how to process what was going on. I knew intellectually I should be feeling some sadness or some loss, and it just wasn't coming. And so what I often do when I'm confused is I just write what happened and then in writing and it really kind of opened up a lot of emotion. I remember I was in my, I pulled into my driveway, and I was listening. Bob Dylan's "Comfort in the Storm" came on. And I just started bawling. And I thought, oh, he's following comfort, you know? So I'd had these waves. And then I had our, we had our own children. And man is that I couldn't encourage people to try it more 'cause it's so revealing. The thing that had occurred to me when our oldest daughter was probably a year and a half old, in my story of my life, I was the victim. He had left me and I was the victim. And now I had this beautiful little girl. And the notion of missing even two minutes of her life is so heartbreaking. I can't imagine the grief I would feel to not see her do all the things. And I went, oh my God, he was the victim. I wasn't the victim. The thing he missed is a lot harder to miss. And I felt real compassion for him. That was like a wave. I also, now that little girl's 12 and she has taken on the same role I had, which is she loves to confront me. She's the one person that's not afraid of the big open the house. And I'm now able to go like, oh yeah, I was a little difficult, you know? - You see yourself in her. - Yes, yes, yes. And I have the capacity. And the resources to be patient with that. You know, I know that I wasn't what I thought I was. He wasn't what I thought he was. And even more, I was very quick with the list of things he hadn't done and the things that he let me down in. But now, 14 years later, I can say my dad was so affectionate with me. Oh my God, he was such a hugger and a kisser. This is Detroit in the '80s. Men weren't hugging and kissing and squeezing their boys. My father had a bunch of gay friends, you know? No one's dad had gay friends. He was in AA for, he died sober, maybe, I guess, probably 28 years sober. He introduced me to that. And not just introduced me to it, but he built this incredibly fun life in there. He modeled that sobriety could be really fun. He did that for me. Flamboyant, he danced. All my emotional confidence to be emotional in public or to be masculine yet vulnerable, those things, he really modeled that way more than most dads in the '80s did. And that gives probably much better than if he came to my basketball games. - It's so interesting to me how one of the things that I've learned, I knew nothing about grief. I never grieved. My brother died, my dad died when I was 10. My brother died by suicide when I was 21, he was 23. And then my mom died in 2019 at the age of 95. But I never grieved. I pushed all that stuff down. I propelled myself forward. And it's only in the last couple of years that I've started to kind of turn to it and try to develop a companionship with it. In the words of Francis Weller, who's a writer, who I think is very powerful, who writes about grief. But one of the things I've learned from doing interviews about it with people, which is the only way I've really learned about grief, is that you can still have a relationship with somebody who has died, and that relationship can actually, it can change and it can grow. I have a closer relationship with my dad now than I ever had before. - Yeah. - I now, I know my dad better. I mean, I was 10 when he died. I saw him through the eyes of a child. I see my dad now through the eyes of an adult. I look at my children and I see what my dad saw through his eyes when he looked at me. So I understand what he was thinking when he looked at me. And in that way, I know this man, and I'm closer to him, and I feel him. I've, excuse me. I feel him inside me for the first time. - Yeah. - And it's extraordinary. Your relationship with your dad has continued. - Oh yeah, it's the best it's ever been, which is the most. Which is the most heartbreaking part. You know, I can't help but be bummed that I didn't have all these realizations and life experiences. And thank you. You just reminded me of the most important thing I left out. About the affection is like, my dad adored me. He adored me the way like I adore my little girls. I know that now, 'cause I- - You didn't know it. - I didn't know 'cause I was judging him on the choices. And if he had adored me, why was he gone for, you know, 12 years or whatever. But I just, I, not only do I look at them in the same way that he looked at me and I recognize it, I annoy them in the same way he annoyed me. You know, he just wanted my attention. It wasn't so bad. And I found it very annoying. And I am like constantly policing myself. I'm like, oh, I'm doing exactly what my dad did. So I know this is how he felt about me. - Do you find yourself talking to him? - No, but I dream about him a ton. I know I asked you last night, if you have any dreams about your mom or anything. And then I'm saddened for you that you don't. But I have this, not only do I have dreams about him, but he was really diminished the last decade of his life. He also had, you know, terrible heart disease. My father, when he ate a pizza at night, he would have a frozen pizza and that was just the base. And then came hot dogs and salsa and chicken fingers and the things that he would create. You know, he was indulgent. And so unfortunately my memory of him for a long time was clouded by that diminished state he was in. But now when I have these dreams with him, I kind of interact with him at my age, with probably him even younger, when he was like a really gunslinging car salesman, who was a smooth talker with ladies. Again, the gift he gave me. - This man was defined by getting girls way out of his pay grade. - By the way, let me just, let me just jump. - I must have got that from somewhere. - Let me just jump in because one of the things you said is that he was in the hospital in his final days and not even really very communicative with you. But there was a moment when a nurse came in and he had to pee and I'm sorry if this offends anybody, but I'll read what you wrote. She was helping him pee and you wrote, "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." - He had stopped talking for five days. I was like, "Oh, he's done talking. This is one of the last stages." And I was like, "No, he definitely just spoke in her ear." - Yeah. Yeah, he said he had lost the will to eat. - And you were able to decipher a few words of what he said, but none of them good. - No. - Yeah. Toward the end though, you actually were able to give him a gift and you write about it. You say, "At one point, and unbeknownst to both of us, my wife walked into the room. She'd flown in from LA without any warning. It was a surprise. It was an amazing, incredible, perfectly timed surprise." Do you want to talk about what she did? - Yeah. I mean, it's hard to. She's done so many incredible things over the 19 years we've been together, but she's intuitive as like crazy. So I was there and I was growing really, really upset with the amount of people visiting my dad. And they were all really well-intentioned. - These were people who had been through AA with your dad. - Yes. - And he had really showed up for them. - Yes. And so his room was an unending parade. A parade of many, many people. And they were all lovely and well-intentioned, but it put me in the position of them grieving and me having to comfort them. And I was starting to resent that I couldn't just be in there with my dad. And I was starting to get really quite overwhelmed with that. And I went outside to sit in the car to get a breather. And I kind of, I called Kristen to just vent about it. I mean, this is unbelievable, this story. - Kristen Bell is your wife? - Yeah. Princess Anna. I was complaining, and she said, "It's okay, I'm here. Look to the left." Mind you, we live in California, and I'm in Detroit. And I looked to my left, and she's standing there, seven months pregnant. She knew I was struggling. And she had flown and not told me, and figured out where this hospital was. It was standing next to the car. But you know, and then, so then we went in my dad and again he wasn't talking I'm only the nurses at that point and and yes she she came in and he he got to feel her belly yeah there's a picture of that I'd like to show look how cute she looks with that belly to his head in her belly that's quite a what's rounder I just want to read what you wrote about that that moment you said 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 contentedly unable to put together a sentence but still capable of connecting to the new family member we were creating he wasn't gonna 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 she's a gangster y'all I have come through my forgiveness and growing love for my dad and my acceptance that I'm so much like him and watching this little girl who's unfortunate or fortunate enough for her very much like me I don't see the divisions anymore the compartments that I thought of is like he's one thing and I'm a thing and she's a thing I can feel we're this thing that's moving through time and it's so special and I'm glad he got to touch the new iteration could you talk more about that this connection through generations through time yeah I mean if you think of like Dawkins book the selfish gene and how really we think of ourselves as animals evolving but we're genes evolving and when you think about evolution on a gene level versus an animal level or a population level it's just a fascinating way to think about how things are just traveling through time and of course half of my genetics are him and they happen to be the ones that seem to be most expressed which is interesting and and then those same ones just zip through me to her there's not a break in those genes you know they don't know that they were in that body in this body in that body they're those genes so I just think the the unending fluid nature of that is is a little beyond comprehension it's a little it's a little spiritual it's a little spooky you feel connected to your dad in a way you never did before I don't know that there's a difference is where I'm approaching I don't know that there's a dad and a me and a her I think there's this like River and um through so much luck and good fortune the river keeps getting better you know uh he had an incredibly challenging life of his own he had addiction he had a lot of things to overcome uh I I did too but I did that a little better and a little quicker and then this little girl of ours is uh you know she's a much superior version of me I'm so optimistic when I see the the trajectory of this fluid line of of genes we're gonna take a short break we'll have more with Dax Shepard in a moment every day animals across the country face abuse and neglect and every day the ASPCA shows up to rescue animals in crisis but they can't do it alone visit aspca.org need become a donor today to provide the care and shelter these animals urgently need and for a limited time the ASPCA will send you a free gift as a special thank you visit aspca.org need I'm Dr Sanjay Gupta host of the chasing life podcast we're going to talk about rethinking how we die how we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live our guest is Dr BJ Miller he's a hospice and palliative care physician we are aging as a people this is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group it's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interest services and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from this subject and makes us cling to life listen to chasing life streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.com/chaseinlife welcome back to my conversation with Dax Shepherd at Tulane University during the New Orleans book festival you lost a friend also recently Eric Dayen yeah yes so Eric Dane I can now say I met in recovery and um we hated each other I hated him I mean this guy is so arrogant uh you hated him from the oh I hated him I hated him based on things he was saying in AA uh-huh okay all right yeah it's not all hugs and flowers Anderson we we're just like any other group of people we're prone to dislike each other I mean he exhibited so many things that I was he hogging time or what was he doing that um he he I thought he was arrogant I thought he lacked humility I thought that he uh he was having a very hard time he had had a big chunk of sobriety then came back and was having a really hard time putting more more time together and um I I thought he was a bit of a bully and we were in a meeting at a friend's house again this was told on the podcast so I'm not speaking out of school but he threatened a younger member of the group and uh this had been simmering for a long time and I said that's let's go outside right now it was on and we walked outside to fist fight in the driveway of an AA meeting it's not the general outcome of an AA meeting thank goodness and uh people intervened and it was broken up and then God bless both of us we kept coming back to the same meeting like neither was gonna not show up and over the course of the next two years I found myself um starting to kind of relate to him I also think he was he was getting maybe more honest or I was open to it but I started I heard his story for the first time his father shot himself in his house I didn't know that um when he was a little boy and uh his mom came upstairs and said I'll tell you what happened if you promise that you won't cry and so that little boy held on to that and then that little boy grew up without a dad like I grew up without a dad and he was so in search of masculine validation and it took all these shapes that I hated that I'm sure he hated in me and I remember he had a share one time and then when it got around to me to share and you're not allowed to cross talk it's a great rule of at least the group I'm in you can't respond directly no you're not to like advise or give your two cents that's uh we call it cross talk it's no good um but I kind of broke that rule and I said I can't believe I'm gonna say this but that's one of my favorite shares I've ever heard I said out loud in reference to Eric and then um maybe a week or two later in one of his shares he said I can't believe I'm gonna say this but I think I've come to follow up with Dax and everyone in the group had seen us go out into the driveway a year or two before and then we became friends and I and I heard his story and I would go to his house all the time and we would chat and connect on this um the vacuum left when you don't have a dad around about how does one know if they're meeting these markers of becoming a man and in in place of that force you rely on your peers which aren't the greatest uh evaluators of masculinity when you're 12. and I came to fall in love with a very scared man trying and hoping he had become a man and I related and uh yeah I ended up loving him so much uh and then uh on that episode of the show this was only two years ago maybe he said on the on in the episode he said yeah my arm's been like uh atrophied on the right they think I have a virus I'm like oh that's so weird a virus that atrophies your arm and then maybe eight months after that he discovered that's not what it was it was ALS and then it was um just an insanely rapid uh decline they asked me to say some things in a tribute to him for for the this big ALS benefit right at the end and um for a person who was so hell-bent on being hyper-masculine and incredibly fit and strong and virile for him to have agreed to become the face of this disease completely diminished I found to be the bravest thing he had done in all these pursuits of manliness I found that to be mind-blowing and highly admirable knowing what baggage he had with it my fear would be that you saw any cracks uh in my in my strength because you will pounce and attack and subjugate me so for me to do what he did would be very, very hard, and I'm pretty blown away by it. Do you show yourself as vulnerable to your kids? Yeah, I'll say that my kids have gifted me this, which is I had not cried from probably 8, 9 years old until about 8 years ago. My other soulmate, other than my wife, is my best friend from childhood. I got a call that he was in intensive care, and it looked very, very, very bad. For me, my tether has been connected to this human, Aaron Weakley, since I was 11, and he was my refuge from this pursuit of masculinity. He also had a crazy childhood, and the two of us were able to be vulnerable with each other, which I think was very, very rare for boys in Detroit in 87. And the thought of him not being here really, really opened something up, and I was trying to tell Kristen the news I just got and that I was going to fly to Detroit, and I just couldn't really. I couldn't get it out, and my kids were there. And then that was the proverbial crack in the dam, and it just hasn't stopped. But these little girls bring it out of me so much, and they love it. They laugh at me. They tease me nonstop. There's Dad crying. My weakness, my Achilles, is any documentary about a female singer, laughter and applause, laughter and applause, laughter and applause, laughter and applause, I watched the Sinead O'Connor doc purposely in my bedroom middle of the day knowing I would maybe have an issue. And sure enough, I see three little faces peeking around the corner. Are you crying, Daddy? No. No. Yeah, if you're a woman who's been through some shit and you step on a stage and open up your mouth and let it rip in spite of that, I'm on the ground crying. So, yeah, they see me crying a lot. My dad used to cry a lot, like, at anything. If the song "Amazing Grace" was playing anywhere, he would, like, weep. We saw a movie called "Conrack" with Jon Voight, and it was about a guy in the South who was a teacher, and I just remember him weeping in the theater. You know, you have this great obligation when you have kids to, for me, the way I frame it, maybe it's right or wrong, which is, like, I'm the guy in their life, and so I'm setting the bar of what they think they deserve. And so I think they deserve someone who takes them very seriously and listens to them all the time. Mm. And I think they deserve a man who's willing to be emotional and be present and not be afraid of their emotions. And I have to get over my shit to be that man in their lives. That's my job. Yeah, I'm just glad I've lived this long to be able to do that for my kids and with my kids. There's nothing better. I think we're out of time, Dexter. Thank you, Dexter. Thank you, Shepard. Thank you. Oh, so fun. Thank you, everybody. I want to thank Dak Shepard for that conversation and the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University for letting us share it as an episode of "All There Is," and I want to thank Walter Isaacson for inviting me there. A couple of upcoming things to tell you about. Thursday, April 9th, I hope you join me at 9:15 p.m. for my streaming show, "All There Is Live." It's our live show about loss streaming on our grief community page, cnn.com/alltheris. You can also communicate with others who are watching at the same time. One of my guests will be Julie Devaney Hogan, a wife and mom to three young kids who was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was treated but has now come back as a very aggressive form of brain cancer. My biggest fear, truly, as a mother, is that they certainly will be given permission to cry, but will they still find joy and humor and ways to laugh in life? Will they come to family events and will they be treated as the child who lost their mother young? Or will they be scooped up and brought into a joke and brought into a laugh and brought into a song as our family typically does? So I have found I have to be really direct in sharing with my family and my close friends what I want right now. What I want is for us to continue to laugh. I want the raw, gorgeous grit of our family to continue to exist as it is. To watch All There Is Live, just go to cnn.com/allthereris on Thursday night, April 9th at 9:15 p.m. If you missed the live stream, it'll be posted the following day for a week on the site. All the older episodes of that show are available on demand for CNN subscribers. Coming up on the podcast, my interview with Sarah Wildman. She's an editor and writer at the New York Times. Sarah's daughter, Orly, had a rare form of liver cancer and died in March, 2023. She was 14 years old. I came across some of the pieces that Sarah has written in the Times about Orly and was so moved by them, I reached out to her and been wanting to talk with her ever since. And we just sat down together a couple weeks ago. There's something so profoundly off-kilter about having nurtured someone from birth and seeing them leave. And I know I'm not the first person to have done it, but it felt so out of order, you know, and I felt like in free fall, you know. What does it mean now? What does anything mean? How do I put one foot in front of the other? How do I relate to anybody? How do I go out looking like a person? You know, how do I not appear to every single person that I'm completely shattered? What's so strange is what allows us to get up again each morning or do the things that we're supposed to do. I almost wanted to run. That's Sarah Wildman on an upcoming episode of "All There Is." If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others who'd like to hear from you, leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. Thanks for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone. slash all access.