Leaving Grant

Tomorrow the photos on the bulletin board at Grant Medical Center come down after spending the month of February on display.  During that time I have flip-flopped week by week from Riverside to Grant, Grant to Riverside, and back over the past few months in transition.  April will see the end of that and I’ll be full time at Riverside after a fifteen year run at Grant.

Those photos are a glimpse of my time there.  They are the beauty that I saw in the people and the environs day by day, season by season, year by year.  It’s appropriate that so many of them are funny and quirky alternating with images that are beautiful and melancholy.  They really are a visual summation of my time at a place I’ve looked forward to going to every single day.

Today was special in that four different people from four different parts of the hospital stopped me and specifically mentioned the board and what photo most spoke to them.  They included an ICU nurse, an elderly maintenance man, a Trauma NP, and a clerk all of whom I’ve known for years.  There was a kind of sparkle in their eyes as they described what they saw.

The maintenance man was particularly moving.  We’ve had brief moments of interacting over the years in the hallways and he always radiates kindness.  He stopped me and told me how special those photos were and his favorite was the one with “rain drops on the window”.  He said he wished he could do something like that and I had the “eye of an artist”.

I think it hit me so deeply and unexpectedly because that is exactly what my godson Kevin had said to me years ago before he’d passed.  He was an actual artist and it had shook me up then and even more so now.  This sweet man had seen something of what I’d tried to convey through creative outlets: expressing feelings of beauty, kindness, sadness, and love.

And tomorrow those photos come down and a little more than a month from now I will no longer be going to Grant as my day to day job.  At this very moment it is like nothing is different  or has changed because I am still doing the same things and talking to the same people this week enjoying their company until that day when it is not pictures going away, but me.  

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