There is a particular stillness to a building that used to be busy. You know it if you have ever stood in a church on a Monday, or walked through a school gym in July. The air is the same air, but it has stopped being in a hurry. I have come to love that stillness, and lately I have been finding it in our small-town hospitals.
Rural hospitals in Texas have closed in recent years. People write about this as though it were a tragedy, and I understand the feeling. Nobody likes to see a sign come down. But I have driven past several of those buildings now, and I want to offer a different way of looking at them.
When the hospital closes, a town learns who its neighbors are. The man with the good truck becomes the man who drives. The retired nurse down the road becomes the woman you call first. The church prayer chain gets longer and more serious. People who used to wave from the porch start keeping each other’s phone numbers on the refrigerator. You cannot buy that kind of closeness. It has to be earned, and I suppose it has to be needed.
My grandmother lived in a town that lost its drugstore lunch counter when I was a boy. The old men who had gathered there every morning did not stop gathering. They moved to the bench outside the post office, and if anything they talked more, because there was no waitress to interrupt them. Losing the counter did not end their friendships. It just moved them outdoors.
I believe the same thing is happening now, on a larger scale. A town without a hospital is a town that has stopped leaning on an institution and started leaning on itself. That is the oldest Texas story there is. We were not settled by people who expected a doctor down the street. We were settled by people who expected nothing and were grateful for whatever came.
I have heard the other side. I have heard about the long ride to the nearest emergency room and the families who made it. I do not wave those stories away. I pray for every one of those families, and I mean every word of the prayer. But I would ask the people telling those stories to remember the rest of the town too, the part that came together and is still standing.
A building is only a building. Brick and glass and a parking lot. What made it matter was the people inside, and the people are still here. Most of them, anyway.
When I vote for my party’s man for the Senate this fall, I will be voting to keep that quiet. From what I gather, the other side would like to see some of those doors opened again, and I am not sure a town would ever pull together the same way.
The parking lot is empty now, and on a still evening it is the quietest place in town. I go there sometimes to think. I try not to need it.
D. M.