Dad’s Funeral and Hurricane Helene Part 1

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.