How would you rate this call?

My Dad has prostate cancer. It has just been discovered and has metastasized to his pelvic bones. He’s in his nineties. As my friend says, prostate cancer (for a whole lot of men) is sort of like gray hair; they’re all going to get it sometime.

On the good side, he has no pain. He also has enough memory loss (maybe related, but probably not) that he doesn’t remember to be stressed. My dad is an A-Number-1-stresser-outer. The fact that he doesn’t seem to really remember why he was at the hospital is really nice. I haven’t had the low down yet from anyone official, but I do know that a huge portion of older men, if they were to be autopsied when they die, have prostate cancer. But that isn’t what kills them. He might have years ahead of him. He may not. I have to talk with my step-mom to know what’s been said.

This has been doing the obvious brain tweaks for me that anyone would be having in a similar situation. No matter how old you are, when you’re parents pass away, you become an orphan. I don’t want to lose him. Of course I don’t.

He and I have been lucky, because in my twenties, we made the effort to become friends (on top of the father/daughter relationship). He became human at some point: fallible, kind, asinine, smart, proud, humble, jerky, honest, fair, snobby. A good portion of his good and bad points are known to me, and I accept them. It’s hard for kids is to get over the omniscient parent thing, because when you were two, parents were gods. They knew you were cold before you knew what cold was. They fed you when you were crying, because they knew you were crying of hunger but you had no idea.

But then when you were crying as a teenager and they had no idea how to help you, many kids get angry. Kids feel lied to when they learn that their parents are human and have usually made a whole pile of mistakes both with their own lives and with child rearing. Many kids never get over that, but I got the chance to. He’s just a guy. But he’s a guy who loves me, and who taught me a lot of stuff.

I called my step-mom with Skype tonight, and after not really being able to talk (because my Dad was in the room), I hung up. The Skype app asked me how I would rate this call. How do I answer that?