A Little Bit Better on the Emotional Front

On the day of Dad’s surgery to fix his broken hip, I arrived at Watauga Medical Center before 8:00 am. Even though I’d been told the night before that nothing would happen with Dad before 9:00 am, he’d already been moved from his room downstairs to be prepped for surgery. I joined Mom and Dad in a room that had been created by being curtained off within a much larger room. It was a giant space, like my old high school cafeteria or a conference room at a convention center, and curtains hung everywhere. We could see lots of other patients and their families waiting for surgery. Doctors came in to stop by and visit with each patient. Dad’s surgeon explained he would put a rod in to connect the upper femur to the hip area. He explained the break wasn’t technically the hip, but they still called it the hip. I asked him about what we could expect for a hospital stay after the surgery and where Dad might go next. The surgeon thought three to five days in the hospital and then added that it wasn’t his area of expertise, but he thought Medicare would pay for at least twenty-one days in a skilled nursing facility. The doctor said to just let the hospital know where we wanted Dad to go. 

This need for us to know where Dad was going next came fast. Of course I had no idea where we wanted him to go. I actually couldn’t name a facility, couldn’t even imagine where one was. Shortly after the surgeon visited, the anesthesiologist stopped by. He explained Dad would receive a spinal block. I took this to be like a woman might receive before delivering a baby. I think the idea was the block would minimize risk and potential further cognitive decline. I thought about one of the tough choices I’d expected: whether or not Dad would have the surgery. It seemed like it was so obvious that he would have it that no one asked. Mom signed the paperwork for it, but there had been no discussion. There had really been no decision. Looking back, I think that was right, and I have no regrets.  

In our history as a family, we Torgersons haven’t been very open or expressive emotionally. I don’t ever remember telling either of my parents that I loved them in high school, and I don’t remember them telling me. For sure, it was clear both mom and dad loved me; it just wasn’t something we expressed with words or hugs. When Dad was in his fifties, he had a procedure to put a stent in his heart. The surgery had been in Indianapolis, and I remember that my sister Anne, my Mom, and me were there with Dad when they wheeled him out of the room. Back then, we’d only been able to muster words to wish him luck and to tell him we’d see him in a few hours. After Dad had been wheeled away, a silence hung over the room like the eye of a hurricane. I remember my sister Anne breaking the silence saying, “We’re such freaks.” I took this to be her observation that we were completely unable to express ourselves emotionally. No I love you’s. No talking through potentially being afraid. Just silence and off you go Dad to have something placed in your coronary artery. 

This time in Boone with Dad’s hip surgery, we did a little better on the emotional talking front. The dam that held all of our emotions in side had cracked a little when I was married and divorced in less than three years in my twenties. I had started to tell my family I loved them, and they had sometimes reciprocated it. Dad told Mom what a great wife she was and how appreciative he was for all the years she’d taken care of him. He told me how proud he was of the father I’d become and that he wished he’d been more like me. Dad expressed regret to me about all the years he’d spent in gyms coaching other people’s kids and all of the time he’d spent on the golf course when we were growing up. Dad was able to say all of that eloquently even though sometimes he thought we were living back in Winamac, and he often forgot the name of the disease he had. “Isn’t that the darndest thing?” he’d say, “I can’t even remember the disease I have.” 

I pointed out to Dad all of the things he did right as a father. After all, he had been an English teacher, a manic preparer for whatever job it was he had to do, and a basketball coach. I was all of those things too, and I thanked him for the example of high character, especially when it came to keeping his word, meeting his responsibilities, and working hard each day. With my Mom and Dad, there were no mental health days from school. Since they were both teachers, we all went to school if it was at all possible. As a coach and teacher’s kid, I was to exceed all of the expectations placed on students and athletes. Dad once called the head basketball coach to report that I had arrived home two minutes after curfew.  This time in the Watauga Hospital, we all told each other we loved one another. When Dad was wheeled out for surgery, I texted my wife Megan and my sister Anne that it felt like we had just said our goodbyes to Dad. We were told we could go up to Dad’s hospital room to wait for the procedure to be over, and that someone would be in touch to tell us how it went. 

Dad’s hospital room at the Watauga Medical Center in Boone was really nice. There were two comfortable chairs, one of which could be converted to a bed and that Mom had slept on the night before. It was a private room with a television and a large window with a view of the south side of town and of the mountains beyond. It felt a little closer to a hotel room than most of the hospital rooms I’d ever been in before. Dad’s surgery took much less time than I expected, less than two hours. The surgeon told us the bones came together nicely. 

Dad arrived back to his room via a hospital bed that whooshed as he was pushed down the hall. “Did I just ride a train?” he asked as he rolled in. It took me a second to realize he thought the hospital bed he’d ridden back to the room was the train he was talking about. The bed really did make a kind of whooshing chug, chug sound. Dad seemed to be under the impression he’d ridden a train from his hometown of Winamac, Indiana. His high school friends and basketball teammates Vic Heater and Bob March were mentioned as passengers on the train. Dad also named his friend Joe, who’d been killed over fifty years before when he was hit by a train. My middle name was Joseph because of Dad’s friend and my daughter Charlotte’s middle name is Josephine after me. 

Dad experienced impressions of things such as trains and lots of people from the past. His stories reminded me a bit of the James Thurber story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” in which the character has many daydream adventures. When dad had come back from his CT scan the day before, he’d mentioned Russia’s Putin and told me that Putin had loaded him into a nuclear warhead. Dad was so relieved that for whatever reason Putin had decided not to launch the rocket he’d been loaded into. I realized that especially from Dad’s point of view, the machine that took the scan must have looked like a warhead. What a life: Dad used to teach classes and enjoy golf and morel foraging in his free time, and now he rode trains and was loaded into nuclear warheads.

• Thanks for checking out this Torg Stories post! This is an excerpt from a longer piece I am writing about dad’s passing and Hurricane Helene’s arrival to my home near Boone, North Carolina.