Dax Shepard sat down with Anderson Cooper at the New Orleans Book Festival on March 11 to talk about grief. More than 13 years after his father’s death, Shepard still can’t tell the story of Kristen Bell’s surprise without breaking down.
In 2012, Shepard’s father, Dave Robert Shepard Sr., was dying of small-cell carcinoma in a Detroit hospital. Every weekend for months, Shepard flew from Los Angeles, where he was filming Parenthood, to take care of his dad. Bell, who was seven months pregnant with their first daughter, stayed in California.
The hospital room became what Shepard described as “an unending parade” of visitors, many from his father’s AA community. They meant well, but it put Shepard in an impossible position. “They were all lovely and well intentioned, but it put me in the position of them grieving and me having to comfort them,” he told Cooper. “I was starting to resent that I couldn’t just be in there with my dad.”
Overwhelmed, Shepard went outside to sit in his car. He called Bell just to vent.
“I was complaining, and she said, ‘It’s okay, I’m here. Look to the left,’” Shepard recalled, his voice catching. “We live in California, I’m in Detroit, and I look to the left and she’s standing outside the car.”
Bell had flown to Detroit without telling him. Seven months pregnant, she’d figured out which hospital his father was in and just showed up.
“Yeah, what a champ! You know?” Shepard said through tears.
They went inside together. Bell lifted her shirt and let Dave put his hand on her belly. He kept it there for almost an hour, smiling, unable to form sentences but clearly connecting with the granddaughter he’d never meet in person.
Cooper read aloud from a blog post Shepard wrote shortly after his father’s death. “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 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.”
Cooper’s voice caught as he continued reading. “If I lived to be a thousand, I would still be in debt to my wife for giving him that one last thrill.”
Shepard could only manage, “She’s a gangster, y’all.”
Dave Shepard died on December 31, 2012, at 62 years old. Three months later, Shepard and Bell welcomed their daughter Lincoln. The relationship between Shepard and his father had been complicated. Dave was an alcoholic, and by Shepard’s own account in his original 2013 blog post, he’d been “a selfish asshole” for much of Dax’s life. But in those final months, they’d patched things up with trips to movies and restaurants and tours of their old homes.
A Pew Research Center study found that 74% of American adults say they’re highly likely to turn to their spouse when they need emotional support. Shepard was losing his father and drowning in other people’s grief. His first instinct was to call his wife, even though he thought she was 2,000 miles away.
She wasn’t. And 13 years later, telling that story still breaks him.
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