On Monday night, I took my father to see Interstellar. Accurate things gleanable from the previews are that it is a movie about mankind in her final hours, struggling to find an escape from a used up Earth, and that it is a movie about the tension between responsibility on small scale (family) and large scale (survival of the species), and that it is a movie about flying to Really Cool parts of space and showing Really Cool, Scientifically Factual things about those parts of space on the screen. So, y’know, it’s a science fiction movie. Cool.

Tonight, I’m sitting in his hospital room after a cancer-related surgery that to all appearances has gone well. I can’t say a whole lot about really cool parts of space here, and I can’t say a lot about the end of mankind, and I can’t really say a lot about responsibility. But I definitely couldn’t help, while watching the ten-year-old girl watch her father getting ready to leave her behind, knowing it was probably forever despite anything he had to say, feeling a twinge of existential terror. I am not, nor have I ever been, a ten-year-old girl. But I think that some parts of the human experience are universal. It may not be blood, it may not be age, it may not be gender, but correct in your mind for whatever part needs correcting and I’m still saying: nobody wants their dad to leave. No matter how good the reason might be, and not many people have as good a reason as “if I don’t, we’ll all just die anyway.”

I usually, and imdb certainly did in this case, separate out my category tags by reserving sci-fi for movies and science fiction for books. But sometimes (Children of Men springs immediately to mind, as it often does when I’m thinking about things like this), when a movie goes to such great lengths to focus on our shared experience of humanity even though we should by rights be looking at really cool things in space? Well, my point is that I try very hard to make these tags usable, in case someone were to ever want to browse by them. And this was, like I said in the first paragraph, definitely a science fiction movie.

Cool.

And, dad? Thanks for staying.