Justin Halpern - Sh*t My Dad Says

I realized then that while my paralyzing fear of death probably wasn’t going to kill me, it was something I should learn to deal with in an adult way sooner rather than later. I decided to talk to my dad about it since he was the most unflappable person on the subject of death I’d ever met.

“When I die, I die. I could give a shit, ’cause it ain’t my problem. I’d just rather not shit my pants on the way there,” is a line I’d heard out of his mouth more than a handful of times. I wanted that same attitude. Or, at least, I wanted to understand how he was able to be so cavalier about it.

So one morning during college, when he was eating Grape-Nuts at the kitchen table and reading the newspaper, I sat down next to him and poured myself a bowl. After listening to us both crunch our way through two suggested daily portions of natural whole-grain wheat and barley, I spoke up.

“Hey, Dad. I have a question.”

He peered over the newspaper to look at me.

“What is it?” he asked.

I began a very roundabout way of getting to the point, philosophizing about religion and the possibilities of heaven and hell, until he cut me off.

“Is there a question somewhere on the fucking horizon?”

“What do you think happens after you’re dead?”

He set his paper down and scooped a big bite of soggy Grape-Nuts into his mouth.

“Well. It’s nothingness for eternity,” he said casually, then picked up his paper and began reading again.

“What do you mean, ‘nothingness’?” I asked, feeling my heart start to beat a little faster.

He put down the paper again.

“Nothingness, you know. Nothing. Like, you can’t even describe it because it’s not anything. I don’t know, if it makes you feel better, just picture infinite darkness, no sound, no nothing. How’s that?”

My heart rate rose further, and I started to feel light-headed. I couldn’t comprehend how he could believe this and be okay with it. Plus, his concept of death only added to my fears the fact that it was infinite. I’ve always had an obsession with keeping track of time. One night in college when I smoked pot, my roommates came home to find me sitting by the microwave, setting fifteen seconds on the timer over and over again so I could keep count of how many minutes were passing. Now I was being told that not only was there no afterlife, but what we all had in store was nothingness, an infinite period of it.

“How do you know that? You don’t know that, it’s just your opinion,” I said.

“Nope. Not my opinion. That’s what happens. Fact,” he replied, pulling the paper back up and starting to read. I could feel I was about to pass out, so I stumbled away from the table and walked toward my parents’ room, where my mom was sitting on their bed. Immediately she could see there was something wrong.

“Justy, you look terrible! What’s the matter?” she said, patting the space on the bed next to her, ushering me to sit down.

I told her what my dad had said, and she tried to calm me down by telling me that obviously he had no idea what happens after we die.

“He’s never been dead, and that’s the only way you can know, right?” she murmured soothingly.

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I replied, not fully convinced.

My dad entered the room at that moment, and my mom looked him sternly in the eye and said, “Sam, tell Justin that you have no idea what happens when you die. He knows it, but just admit it.”

“I will not. I know exactly what happens, and that’s what happens.” And he left the room.

I slept very little that night. I kept trying to wrap my head around the idea of infinite nothingness. The last time I had had that much difficulty sleeping was when I was fifteen years old and stayed awake half the night overanalyzing Back to the Future II and brainstorming all the parallel Hill Valley neighborhoods that would result from Michael J. Fox’s traveling back and altering time. That time, excitement mixed with confusion kept me up; this time, it was sheer terror.

After tossing and turning most of the night, I finally gave up on sleep and dragged myself out of bed at 5:30 A.M. I strolled out of my bedroom to find my dad back at the kitchen table, eating Grape-Nuts. He asked me to sit down, so I did.

“Do you know the great part about infinity?” he said.

“No.”

“It’s never over. You, your body, the energy inside it, it all goes somewhere, even after you die. You’re never gone.”

Clearly, my mom had had a word with him.

“So you’re saying you think we live forever? Like, ghosts and all that stuff?” I implored.

“No. Jesus Christ. You need to take a fucking science course or something. What I’m trying to say is that what makes you up, it’s always been around, and it always will be around. So really the only thing you should worry about is the part you’re at right now. Where you got a body and a head and all that bullshit. Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.”

Then he put down his spoon, looked at me, and stood up.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to do one of the best things about being alive: take a shit.”

“Hello?… Fuck you.”

“You’re not a cigar guy…. Well, the first reason that jumps out at me is that you hold it like you’re jerking off a mouse.”

“You can do what you want. But I can also do what I want. And what I’ll be doing is telling everyone how fucking stupid your tattoo is.”

“Call me if something’s on fire, and don’t screw in my bed.”

“So, the woman and the dopey-looking guy screw, and then they look for aliens—or they just screw and sometimes aliens follow them?”

“Fuck it, I’m old. Gimme free stuff.”

“Gore seems kind of like a pompous prick, but every time I see Bush I feel like he’s probably shit his pants in the last year, and it’s something he worries about.”

“I know you think you’re going to get all kinds of laid. It’s not a magic place, it’s the same as here. Don’t be stupid.”

“If you sell them over the age of twenty, it means you either never get laid or you have a drug problem.”

At about nine years old, I started developing a strange, uneasy feeling in my joints. It felt kind of like a little tiny person was inside them, tickling me. I wasn’t in pain, but I was uncomfortable a lot of the time, and the sensation had an unfortunate side effect: it caused frequent muscle spasms. My mom encouraged me to see a doctor, but the physician I went to couldn’t find anything wrong with me. “He’s growing fast, and it’s taking a toll. It’s natural. It will pass,” he said.

My brother Dan offered a different diagnosis: “Maybe it’s because you’re a gay,” he suggested one night, after I had complained to my dad for the umpteenth time at dinner.

“Quiet,” my dad barked at my brother. “Does it hurt?” he asked me.

“No. It’s just, I don’t know. Weird.”