Bill Torgerson

On August 8, 2024 and forty-two days before dad would pass away, he fell and broke his hip. I was upstairs getting ready to take my teenage daughters Charlotte and Izzy to Boone for a basketball workout at Watauga High School. My wife Megan yelled to me upstairs that dad had fallen. Dad falling was something that happened somewhat frequently. He’d had some more serious falls where he’d scraped his arm on his walker or got a bruise on the side of his butt. However, most of the time he kind of slow-motion slumped to the floor rather than a sudden fall. He called what he experienced before slumping to the ground grayouts. I think what happened on those was that he stood up too quickly, his blood pressure dropped, and then he slid to the floor as he lost consciousness.  The closest I’ve come to such a feeling is riding a roller coaster in my fifties when the darkness starts to close in around an increasingly smaller point of light in the center of my vision.

Megan and I went into mom and dad’s room where dad lay in the middle of the floor. I looked him over and felt around his head. He didn’t have any bumps or scratches. I didn’t see any blood. I asked him what hurt. “That was a hard one,” he said. “My side hurts.” I thought he seemed okay, like all of the other times he fell. Megan and I got on each side of dad, helped him up, and put him in his chair. All the other times dad had fallen, he’d sit in his chair for awhile and then he was okay. A few times, he was sore for a couple of days. 

Dad was an incredibly reluctant pill taker and so when he said he wanted an Advil, we knew he must be hurting pretty good. I gave him the pill, and then my daughters and I headed to the high school. Mom and my wife Megan were home with dad in case he needed anything.

At this point in Dad’s life, we had started to work with a hospice service. Previously, I’d thought of hospice as a literal building where a person would go to be made as comfortable as possible in the days that lead up to their death. My wife’s dad had gone to hospice with lung cancer. We had visited him regularly. I thought people lived in hospice for a couple of weeks or months. When home hospice care was suggested by dad’s neurologist, I at first thought the end must be near for Dad. I came to understand that the word was a kind of medical care, the kind where the goal isn’t to get better in the way a physical therapist might set a goal for the patient to be able to walk to the end of the hall in a few weeks. Instead, the goal was to make the patient comfortable. Hospice staff had instructed us to call them before calling for an ambulance or taking dad to the ER. 

With me on my way to the high school with the girls, Dad was in enough pain that Megan called the hospice number we had been given. The nurse with whom Megan had talked thought it was possible that dad had broken his hip. Just as I was arriving to Watauga High School, I received a text from Megan at 5:14 pm: Nurse thinks pawpaw has a hip fracture. He’s in there screaming. Calling 911 now.

I wondered if I should head straight to the hospital to meet dad, or if I should rush home. The high school is just over seven miles of really curvy roads away from our house. It’s a drive that usually takes about twenty minutes. Megan said she was standing in our garage watching for the ambulance. The girls and I decided to go home. I learned on this day that given where my family and I live, we should always drive ourselves to the hospital if at all possible.

The ambulance arrived shortly after the girls and I did. The EMTs were two upbeat women who kept cracking jokes. The jokes and laughter felt wrong for the moment, but I also understand my conventions for how to behave in a situation aren’t everyone’s and that’s okay. For them, it was just another day at work while for my family, we suspected this fall could be THE FALL we’d worried about that would start a more direct path to the end of dad’s life. Maybe the EMTs didn’t think dad’s injury was that serious. 

The EMTs behavior reminded me of some students I’d worked with in a writing course at Appalachian State University. Somehow, I’d ended up with three EMTs in one class section. Sometimes we study what we call Discourses. Discourses are groups of people with common goals, shared specialized language, tools that need to be mastered in order to succeed in the Discourse, and stated and unstated guidelines for behavior. Discourses can be all kinds of groups of people including those with a certain major, the staff of a business, clubs, sports fans and so on. The EMTs I’d had in class had written about how sometimes there’s a sort of gallows humor that was needed to help them cope with the sort of issues they had to navigate at work. Okay, the EMTs were laughing and smiling more than I’d like while my dad suffered in his chair, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. We’re out here sharing the world with lots of people who aren’t like us. 

Three firemen also came to our house. They had been called in case help was needed when it came to moving dad from his recliner in his bedroom to the ambulance. The firemen were incredibly empathetic to our situation. Each of them told all of us how sorry they were to have to come over in this circumstance, and that they were sorry to have to cause dad so much more pain to get him where he could be helped. Dad mostly moaned with an occasional scream mixed in. It was the most pain I’d ever seen him in. I tend to go emotionally numb in these kinds of situations. My focus just goes unemotionally to whatever it is that has to be done. I usually get upset later after whatever intense situation has passed. In this case, I actually didn’t have to do anything. The EMTs and the firemen handled it. 

I rode with Dad in the back of the ambulance to the hospital while Megan followed us with Mom and our girls in her silver Toyota Highlander. Dad told me he just wanted to stop hurting. Nothing the EMTs had given him seemed to lessen his pain. When we got to Highway 105 that runs from Boone to Linville, the driver turned the wrong way onto the highway. For a second, Megan and I exchanged texts thinking maybe we were going to the Avery Hospital and not to Watauga in Boone. I asked the driver, and she said she needed to turn around. Every bump hurt dad. I didn’t realize our roads were so bumpy. 

At the hospital, the EMTs took dad inside and I went back to Megan’s car to get mom. Mom has one bad knee, a knee she would eventually have replaced. When a doctor would ask mom how long her leg had been hurting, I always got a kick out of her pat response. “Since high school,” she would say. I had to help mom get out of the car because she couldn’t bend her knee enough on her own. She would always grimace when I’d bend her leg the extra few inches needed. Mom and I walked slowly into the ER, and someone walked us back to dad’s room. He was in a hospital bed and a curtain separated us from the hallway. 

Every once in a while, dad had to be moved. I remember there was an x-ray and then later a CT scan. Both times I followed dad down the hall in his bed while mom stayed in dad’s room. For the CT scan, I waited outside a small room where several people tried to get the scan done. Dad sounded as if he were being tortured on the other side of the door. I felt sick listening to dad suffer, but it seemed like what had to be done. After the scan, dad was taken back to his ER room. I remember that we had to wait until a room could be made ready upstairs. I don’t remember that I’d been talking a lot, but I remembered Dad laying back in his bed. “Let’s try silence for a while,” he suggested. I squeezed his hand. Mom sat on the other side of the bed. She was already exhausted before this day had begun. Every once in awhile her head would jerk from momentarily falling asleep. 

As dad lay back in his bed with his eyes closed, I tried to anticipate the decisions we might have to make:

1. Should dad have surgery on his hip if it was recommended?
2. Where would dad go when he was discharged from the hospital? 

I texted my wife Megan and my sister Anne–who lives in Los Angeles–and shared those questions. Before this night of Thursday, August 8th, we had decided–with dad leading the conversation–that he wouldn’t do anymore surgeries. The ways in which dad retained some cognitive abilities but lost others was interesting. On the one hand, he could no longer follow the score of a game on television or find his way from the kitchen back to his room, but on the other hand he might tell us about new research on Parkinson’s or quote us a Keats poem verbatim.  

Going back a decade, dad had long ago told us he wanted to be Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) status. Especially the past five years or so, dad had told us his faith was strong, and he was ready to die whenever that time came. One day in the middle of working with a physical therapist to try and stand from his chair, he suddenly demanded, “What’s the point?” A couple years ago while I was away at a travel basketball tournament with my family, dad had what turned out to be a twisted intestine that had caused him excruciating pain and for which there had been an emergency surgery. I remembered mom (who isn’t a regular cusser but will throw something out if she does something like slicing her finger while cutting vegetables) using the phrase shit everywhere about dad’s hospital room the twisted intestine day. That time, we’d all noticed that after the surgery for the twisted intestine–likely due to the combination of Parkinson’s, dad’s age, and the general anesthesia–that dad had noticeably declined cognitively. From that standpoint, none of us thought dad should have more surgeries, but he was in an incredible amount of pain and so considering that, it seemed like yes to the surgery was the right call. Mom and I did already have the legal power established to make financial and medical decisions for dad. 

As for the other decision–where dad would go if he could be discharged from the hospital–we thought we knew that Medicare would cover dad for possibly up to 100 days after a hospital stay. Mom, who had turned 83 over the summer, had been dad’s primary caregiver up to this point. Dad slept very little at night; he wanted mom to help him go to the bathroom, and he often went four times or more a night. Many mornings, the first thing mom would do is announce to me how many times dad had got up the night before. Once mom was thoroughly exhausted from a long night, dad would often sleep most of the morning. We had explored whether or not we could afford to place dad in a facility. From what we could tell, costs would start around $5,000 a month and could easily be over twice that. There was a whole lot we didn’t know back then about navigating the system to get long-term care; I don’t think I even understood the phrase long term care. I repeatedly offered to sleep in Dad’s room to give mom a break, but she just kept telling me it was good to know that it was an option, but that she could keep up what she was doing for now. 

Sitting with dad in his ER examination room, I tried to figure out if maybe dad had mercifully fallen asleep. Recently, I’d started the habit of peering closely at dad to try and tell if he was still breathing, and I could see the slight rise and fall of dad’s chest. I took out my phone and tried to see what I could learn about people dad’s age–he was 85 at the time of this fall–and life expectancy after a broken hip. On the National Institute of Health (NIH) website (Aug 8, 2025 at 7:43 pm) I read, “Among patients on hospice at the time of the hip fracture, 8.8% died during the initial hospitalization and an additional two-thirds died within the first six months on hospice. The median survival from hospital admission was 25.9 days for those forgoing surgery compared to 117 days for those who had surgery.” Dad had not been doing well, but the information on the NIH website felt startling to me. There was an 8% chance that dad would pass in the hospital and that if he did have the surgery and met the average, he’d just barely outlive the 100 day Medicare coverage. I decided that it was okay not to think yet about what might happen after dad’s surgery. If he had the surgery and lived through that, then I could start trying to figure out where he might go. I didn’t share any of those statistics I had learned with mom. 

An orthopedic surgeon came to see mom, dad, and I that night in the ER room. It was so obvious to the surgeon that dad should have surgery that he didn’t really even pause to ask us. He just jumped ahead to how the surgery would work and what to expect after. I did ask a question just to think through if there were any scenarios where dad wouldn’t have the surgery. The surgeon repeated most of what I had just been reading online and said because of dad’s pain, he recommended the surgery. Mom decided she’d go home with Megan to get some of her things for the night. I waited with dad until he could be moved to a hospital room upstairs. Surgery would be the next morning.

This is the end of Part II. Thanks for taking the time to read some of our story.

This story is mostly about two events that happened on September 27, 2025: my father Martin Torgerson’s funeral in Winamac, Indiana and Hurricane Helene’s arrival to the Appalachian Mountains near Boone, North Carolina. Winamac is where I’m from, a small town of 2,000 people in the middle of the cornfields in north-central Indiana. My parents, my sister and I all graduated from Winamac High School. I think there were 112 people in my graduating class.

Boone, North Carolina is near where I live now. It’s in the mountains where lots of tourists come to visit, and I teach in the English Department at Appalachian State University. After dad’s funeral in Winamac, the plan was to drop off my sister Anne for her flight home to Los Angeles and then drive the rest of the 550 miles home with my mom Sue.

I hadn’t thought about the impending hurricane very much mostly because I’d been at first consumed with helping to care for dad until he passed on September 20th and then making plans for the funeral in Winamac. For us in the mountains of North Carolina, hurricanes had meant that the power might go out for a couple of days or the bridge over the Watauga River on the way to the Valle Crucis Park might become flooded. Maybe we’d have a couple of trees down on the property. Days before Helene, I had only a vague understanding that the path of the hurricane might travel north up from Boone along the same route mom and I planned to take South as we drove from Indianapolis to to Louisville, east to Lexington, and then southeast through the Cumberland Gap past Johnson City, Tennessee and then on to our home.

Parkinson’s disease had played a major role in my father’s death. I remember he first started to notice his condition because of golf. He’d always been an avid golfer with a really unusual whipping-hook golf swing and had at his best managed to shoot a stroke or two under par a couple of times at his favorite golf course in Logansport, Indiana. It was his favorite because it’s where all of his buddies played. Dad’s golf game eroded quickly as more and more of his shots off the tee plowed almost immediately into the ground. To him, it seemed like one day he was a good golfer and a few weeks later he was terrible. At the time, he figured he’d always had a short swing that leaned on his physical strength to create power–that rather than the leverage of having a bigger swing arc–and he’d just lost it. If it wasn’t power, then he just thought his timing was gone. He gave up golf, and not too long after that the Parkinson’s diagnosis came. 

For the twenty years after dad’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s, his mobility had steadily decreased until his movement was restricted to shuffling back and forth to the toilet. Mom helped him with that for years, and we’d been warned that falling would be very dangerous for dad, and he had subsequently fallen several times left with bumps and bruises, sometimes with scrapes and cuts he sustained as he grazed his walker on his way to the floor.

Mom and Dad lived with my family near Boone, and they had a bedroom on the other side of the main floor, a back entrance and driveway they could use, and a separate sitting room that they never used. Mom and dad mostly kept to their room except for when mom came out to make her and dad’s meals, and she also did their laundry. Their room was big enough that they had two recliners set up positioned so they could watch sports and news on the television mounted on the wall. When I would get up from visiting dad and mom in their room, dad would thank me for coming by as if I’d stopped by his house and I lived somewhere else.

The few times mom would leave dad’s side was when she went to the grocery store, got her hair done, or had a doctor’s appointment. During those times if I wasn’t sitting with dad, I used a baby monitor so I could hear him if he needed something. From the way dad behaved when mom left, it seemed he was just waiting for a moment when he was alone in his room so he could make a break for it to the rest of the house. The breaks were never to go outside or get away from the house. Sometimes he would just try and get up out of his chair and go over to the computer in his room and other times he would head toward the kitchen, usually with plans to find me and have a talk. Even when I was a kid, a couple of times a year dad would want to have a capital-T Talks with me. By that, I mean this was an event where I would sit down across from dad. He would have pages of handwritten notes, and I was to sit and listen to whatever it was he had to say.

The first helpful talk I remember dad giving was on the subject of my high school girlfriend. Dad felt I had made myself too available and was allowing myself to be taken for granted. My girlfriend and I used to break up and get back together quite a bit. We’d been on a recent break but had a date planned. Dad thought I should break the date and just do anything else. Dad would never use this phrase, but in short he was saying I should play hard to get. I ignored Dad’s advice and went on the date. It wasn’t too long after that day that my girlfriend and I were done for good. So maybe it wasn’t such a helpful talk since I didn’t take his advice. Two of the other talks I remember were about my faith before going off to a really conservative Christian university called Olivet Nazarene. Dad didn’t want me to just go assimilate into that faith. He wanted me to think about what I believed before I went to go live there. He also urged me to file for divorce during my first marriage.

Even before dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, many of his talks resulted in me thinking, that’s a crazy idea. When it came to basketball, dad would have lists for both Anne and I after games with a short column of what stood out in a good way and then a long list of criticisms to consider. The basketball talks rubbed my sister Anne the wrong way and probably stole some of the fun she might have playing sports if dad could have chilled out a little bit. Anne would probably disagree with what I’m writing here. She would just say she ignored his basketball talks.

With Parkinson’s and over twenty years since I’d played basketball, dad continued the Talks with me, even when he was in his 80s and I was in my 50s. Among the things I can remember dad wanting to Talk about was that he wanted to short the oil market; he wanted a shotgun; he wanted to continue driving; he wanted my wife Megan and I to sell our home, and he wanted to purchase our neighbor’s side-by-side vehicle. Dad talked about needing to have skin in the game. Dad’s Parkinson’s had progressed to the point that when he left the kitchen, he did not know how to get back to his room. Thankfully, when I pointed that fact out to him as gently as possible, he sort of chuckled and agreed that maybe a gun or a car or a side-by-side wasn’t the best idea for him. By skin in the game, I think dad just wanted to exercise his will on anything. He’d reached the point where what he wanted or desired to make happen, just wasn’t going to happen. About the only thing he had some control over was what he wanted for dinner.

About my daughter Charlotte, dad once asked, “What is Charlotte’s name again?” I focused on being patient with dad and his condition, and I saw our situation as an opportunity to follow the commandant to honor my father and mother. I remember asking dad to repeat what he’d asked me about Charlotte. I wondered if he would recognize that he’d used Charlotte’s name in his quesiton. “Oh,” Dad said in a moment of realization, “her name is Charlotte.” He thought about that for a second. “That’s kind of funny isn’t it?” he asked. After a few more seconds he added, “And sad.” Dad would often tell people he met that he couldn’t even remember the name of the disease he had. “Isn’t that the darndest thing?” he’d ask before going on to tell whoever he was talking to about all of the Parkinson’s treatments he’d been reading about.

*Thanks for checking out this excerpt of a longer piece about my dad’s funeral and the passing of Hurricane Helene through the area in Boone, North Carolina. I hope to continue to share more drafts of this work in posts to come.