The Old Hospital (Essay 1)

(Assignment 1: Describe and/or analyze what place/person/event/thing best represents the Harrisonburg/Rockingham area.)

It is a curious phenomenon of the English language that causes a thing to become old overnight. With just a few ordinary hours and a small bit of fanfare, the hospital across the street became the old hospital and linguistically passed into the realm of overgrown ivy, broken windows, and sighing support beams. French, of course, does not allow for such confusions or illusions. In that policed language of poetry and love, “l’hôpital ancien” is that which used to be the hospital, while “le vieil hôpital” is the one with the ivy. But where is the romance in such clarity of expression?

I walked through the halls of the old hospital not too long ago, finally giving in to the morbid but irresistible curiosity that draws me to the places that people have left behind. The beams were perfectly solid and most of the windows remained unbroken, but, in the empty hallways, the air itself felt somehow dilapidated. Gone were the gurneys and white-coated doctors, but that distinctive smell of hospital sterility lingered, pathetic in its refusal to let go of the vacant building. I call it pathetic, but it grasped me still; it filled me once again with the indescribable excitement of meeting a new baby brother or sister, the detached sadness of visiting a dying acquaintance, and the nauseating panic of struggling to understand the mechanics of a parent’s chemotherapy and radiation.

The antiseptic harshness made me contemplate, too, as it always does, the hospital’s ghosts. I thought about all of the people who had died when the old hospital was still the hospital, and I wondered if they were resentful about being left behind. Or could they have been ready to be forgotten? Did they appreciate the hush that fell over the hospital the day it became old? I closed my eyes and remembered them for a little while, just in case.

As I stood in the vacant hallway, breathing in the phantoms of the empty building, I realized how much of the essence of any place lies in its hospitals. We spend mere fractions of our frenzied lives in hospitals, but those moments so often represent the greatest joys and deepest sorrows of human existence. How many of us will, at some point in our lives, stand awestruck over a hospital bassinet and marvel at the impossibility of new life? How many of us will collapse on a hospital floor when a white sheet is drawn across an intimately known face? It is those moments that anchor us to our humanity.

Soon enough, the old hospital will become the University’s new building of something or other, and an updated name and fresh coat of paint will erase any traces of hospital smell and overgrown ivy. The new hospital will become just the hospital, and the old one will cease to exist in our words and in our memories. The ghosts will remain, but we, ever eager to move on, will forget.