Dad said when you’re gone, you’re gone. He was wrong

My father was never what you’d call a people person. He preferred being on his own, puttering around his workshop or relaxing in the recliner, pondering the world’s mysteries and searching for ideas no one else had considered.

When I went home to visit, we would spend time together, but he would eventually drift off to be alone with his thoughts. I didn’t take it personally. It was just Dad being Dad.

As I sat in a hospital room in Braselton, Ga., last week, holding his hand and knowing he was slipping away, I had a thought that made me laugh: Dad wasn’t so much dying as he was committing the ultimate act of reclusiveness.

He would get a kick out of that description. As if he was telling the world, “It’s been nice being here, but I have big thoughts to think. So I’m off.”

Dad died Thursday, peacefully, quietly and, I’m quite sure, endlessly curious about the whole experience.

A friend of mine had to have heart surgery years ago. My dad, who had been through the same operation, called and offered him some assurances.

After hearing about Dad’s death, the friend sent me a message recalling their conversation: “He gave me the details of his experience and finished his recollections by saying, ‘I found the whole experience to be quite fascinating.’ “

That was Glen Huppke in a nutshell. Clinical. Inquisitive. And, in his own way, quite funny.

Father’s Day is Sunday, and it’s going to feel empty.

I can’t grasp it yet, can’t fathom that the man I’ve known all 46 of my years will never again pick up the phone, hear my voice and say, “Hey, noble son!”

On Father’s Day, we tend to project perfection on our dads. World’s Greatest! No. 1 Dad! Best Dad Ever!

Let’s set such unrealistic expectations aside. No dad is perfect, and mine was no exception.

He was a good man. He followed the family motto outlined to me as a kid: “Leave the world a better place than it was when you came into it.”

But he could be selfish, rarely going out of his way to do things others enjoyed. He was a brilliant scientist, generating ideas that sounded like they could change the world, but he lacked the confidence to follow through and seemed forever cowed by fear of failure.

Perhaps worst of all, he thought he was always right. And, as much as I loved him, he wasn’t. Not even close.

In the hours spent in his hospital room and the haze of days that followed, I recalled something he once told me with great certainty. And I recognized how wrong he had been.

My mom raised me Catholic, but Dad was an atheist. Religion didn’t jibe with his scientific mind — “mystical hocus-pocus” he called it.

When I was little, I asked him: “What do you think happens to people after they die?”

And he said, matter-of-factly: “When you’re gone, you’re gone. That’s it.”

You were wrong about that, Dad. And I now have empirical evidence to back me up.

Since the moment you took your final breath, you’ve somehow been more alive to me than I could imagine.

Everything has been vivid, moments in time leaping forth in high definition, filling my mind with scenes and sounds, tastes, smells and colors.

Trips to Arby’s for chocolate milkshakes, and you telling them to “add a few extra shots of chocolate.” Riding our aluminum boat down the Crystal River in Florida, you steering that beat-up blue Evinrude outboard, watching schools of fish chase along and dragging our hands through the cool spring water.

The zip line you set up in the backyard, the one with the exposed pulley and no place to land. The electric go-kart you built. (It’s possible you were trying to kill me.)

The way you’d punish kids who looked too old to be trick-or-treating by reaching your hand in their bags, thumping the side so it sounded like you dropped something in while deftly removing a piece of their candy.

I look at the old photos that my wife put on our dining room table, and I see it all. Us straddling the Continental Divide in Colorado. You on the floor with me, setting up a Lionel train set.

You’re strong again, vibrant. I can feel you carrying me to my bedroom after I would pretend to fall asleep in the back of the car. I can see you standing in the sawdust-covered garage late at night, working at a wood lathe, lost in thought.

You’re not gone, Dad. It’s not just, “That’s it.”

Sunday’s going to hurt, as I imagine it does for anyone who has lost a father.

I’ll miss the physical presence of the man who used to carry me, the man who taught me how to order a robustly chocolaty milkshake, the man of grand ideas, the man who, faults and all, was always there to cheer me on.

I left him in that Georgia hospital, tears pouring down my face. But I’ll never say that man is gone.

He was just wrong. Wrong about the end. Wrong about gone meaning gone.

And for that I’ll be forever grateful.