Hospitals have always been places of death for me.

I've only been there for loss.

Everyone there knows it. It's the unspoken words read in everyone's eyes, from the swing-shift guard making sure there's no trouble in the emergency ward, to the volunteer that wisks you quickly past the NICU in a tour: This is a place of endings.

And it's always about waiting.

Waiting to find out the latest status. Waiting for some procedure. Waiting to say goodbye.

You start to lose all sense of reality when you've been there long enough; disconnected from the outside world, in a perpetual twilight of artificial sounds and light. Waiting for endings.

The weight of sadness settles in on you the longer you're there, as you watch faces of the people there.