The Ending of an Era...

I feel so discontented when life changes on me and I'm not prepared.

Today, the Banner Mesa Medical Center (formerly known as the Mesa Lutheran Hospital) closed. I was born there. My sister was born there. Most of my extended family was born there. It was in that hospital that I have participated in countless--countless--waiting-room vigils for loved ones. {Evidently convening in waiting rooms while a family member has a baby or undergoes surgery is not a common occurrence. In the Leavitt Family, it's a given. If someone is at the hospital, we are all there--not necessarily in the hospital room, but definitely in the waiting area. Steve's Krazy Sub is always involved in these wakes, and they are times that the family comes together...for strength, for socialization (if the situation is not life-or-death), or sometimes just to annoy the people at the nurse's station. I was 19 years old by the time I realised that not every family does this.} I've held the hand of many sick family members at "my hospital;" spent numberless nights on ridiculously hard and endlessly squeaky cots.

Here's the "old" sign on the Brown Road Curve. It looks awfully bare. Forlorn, even.

The management had been planning on closing the hospital for a long time, but I don't think any amount of time could prepare me for the sense of loss I feel now, at it's closure. I didn't even get to go to the 9th floor one last time. And it was not a big deal to them! I feel cheated. I feel like the hospital has been abandoned, used for its purposes and now left lonely since it 's grown too old to be considered "cost-efficient." [Vile phrase, that.]

Poor Kyle--if I feel this downtrodden from a 44 year-old building closing its doors, how will I be when I move out of the country I've called home for 20 of my 21 years? Poor, poor Kyle...