Hospital wrapped in community history

My life is full of more meetings than I care to think about.

While I may be tempted from time to time to play hookey from some of them, there is one set it would take a lot to make me miss: those dealing with the fate of our town’s former hospital building.

Our hospital was closed in 1993 though the building was in use for a time after that providing overflow housing for a group of seniors who needed long term care. The empty building sits on a hill in the middle of town, a hospital not converted but closed.

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Where it was once a symbol of pride in the community it is now a symbol of dejection and lost hopes.

A committee was formed to look into uses for it. The area economic committee, of which I’m the chair, has recently become involved in finding a tenant or tenants for the building.

We toured the former hospital recently. I thought I’d be fine. It’s just an empty building, after all. I wasn’t.

The memories flooded back: here’s where we waited to see if our girls were all right after a school bus accident; this is where my youngest was hospitalized for asthma; the solarium is where we sat one Sunday morning watching dad and older sister going into church; this is the room I was in when I was first so sick with Crohns and no one knew what was wrong; this is the operating room where hubby’s head was stitched after his water truck turned over.

I had to find a quiet corner to be alone for a few minutes.

I’ve only been here for 23 years. The hospital had been here twice that long, a replacement for an even older one that burned down.

I suddenly understood the attachment of the townspeople to the building. It is more than a symbol of what was and what could have been. In a very real way it is bound up with the history of every family in the community.

It is where family members were born and died and where they went when they were hurting.

The building is in excellent shape. There are no cracks in the foundation. It is ready for a new life and it sits in the middle of town in a prime location.

It is close to the South Saskatchewan River where recreational activities abound: fishing and hunting, grass greens on the golf course. The town boasts a swimming pool in the summer, a hockey school in July, the July 1 gopher races and, in the winter, a multi-use facility that can house meetings and hockey and curling and bowling and wrestling all at the same time.

Sound like a sales pitch? It is.