"Your" Hospital

Aaron, this feels very surreal.

I’m sitting in your hospital and you’re not here, but maybe you are?

That’s how I’ve always thought of it, “your hospital”. I was so excited to help design it, so thrilled that it was so close to home. It would mean that family and friends would find it so easy to come see you when you were in here.

And you’re not.

But it’s beautiful! 

The ribbon cutting is next Friday and right now they’re putting finishing touches on everything. It smells new. It’s perfectly clean and bright and so close to being ready to help children. 

Beginning with design in 2018, those long days every month meeting up in Salt Lake… To holding our monthly meetings for the new exec team at American Fork Hospital… To presenting your story to the leadership team in the South Bay area of Provo. You even met with your ENT last May in American Fork where they were renting space in preparation to seeing patients down here in clinic. 

All these steps to opening.

I never dreamed you wouldn’t be here for this. 

But maybe that’s better for me. 

While I imagined you here, I never actually saw you here. Yesterday at the main hospital, I was looking for people I knew, seeing the places we went together, the elevators we rode as we’d discharge, the hallways we traversed to and from various imaging studies. There’s none of that here. 

But it still feels like Primary’s, your “vacation home.”

It is so amazing, and the number of children and families this place will bless is immense. 

And you are a part of it, even if you’re not still here. 

“What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness.”

— Thomas Bailey