Thank you, Bridget Rowan, it has been special. You, too, Margaret, and Olive. I wrote the other day that I said my goodbyes to O’Hearn’s, but today was the last day the pharmacy was open, and I couldn’t help but going back there to say one more goodbye, to trade a couple more hugs.

O’Hearn’s is closed.

Bridget was an absolute wreck, I will do her one last favor of not putting up her photograph, she looked great but was in tears all day. I’m not sure she can handle too many more goodbyes. The street was filled with cars, there was a line inside the pharmacy, people were scooping up momentos to take home, they were crying and thanking Bridget, the air was thick with feeling and emotion and change.

I bought a ring for Maria, so she would have a momento also. I know the world will not come to an end, the chain store down the road will give us our medications much like Bridget did, but surely not in the same way. What was interesting was that so many people wanted this kind of pharmacy, yet it doesn’t matter what they want, the people who run the systems that run the world don’t seem to care what they want.

Or perhaps it is true that the only things Americans want is the lowest prices delivered in the most automatic and routine way. I can’t say what most Americans want. I accept change and even embrace it, but my heart was heavy today. Something was lost, something that can never be replaced, something the children of the world will never know.

I saw almost everyone I knew there, they were shaking their heads, some were crying they told story after story of Bridget helping them, looking out for them, calling insurance companies to go to bat for them, doing paperwork for them. They felt as if they were being cast out into a cold and alien world. Is it really true that we have forgotten what people are for, and that they no longer fit into our vast and disconnected political, economic and technological system.

I don’t really want to believe that. The Rite-Aide will be fine, I will do my part to make it so. But when so many people love something so deeply, when it matters so much, when they are so willing to fight for it and support, then something is broken when it can’t survive. Something special is lost. I asked Bridget how much more of this she could take, she said she was about spent. I could see that in her eyes. They were red and bleary.

She was almost cried out.

“I called the Rite-Aid,” Bridget told one man, “and I said you better take good care of Bill. And they said they will, and I believe them.”

O’Hearn’s was a pharmacy, but it was, of course, more than that. It was a place to be known, to be understood, to be worried about. A place to laugh, gossip, to feel important. Bridget’s gift was making everyone feel as if they still mattered, still counted, even if they don’t.  It was a place of trust and community. It is not the only place like that in my town, perspective is always important.

But there is no other place like it now.

I do wonder why it is that people cannot keep the things in their lives that they want, how distancing and alienating it felt to see all of these people, all of these fanatically devoted customers, all of them wanting Bridget to stay behind her counter and prosper. All of them sad and angry that no one cared what they wanted.

What does it mean that this no longer seems to matter? Is this why the people oniine are so angry, why our political system has turned so angry and foul? I don’t have the answers, just the questions.

Something special did die on Main Street today, I will perhaps not see it again in my life. So that is sad. I am grateful that I got to see it at all. So that is good.

Bridget has given me and others the great gift of understanding what community is and means. We will never take that for granted again.

And I am happy that I brought a small piece of Bridget’s Pharmacy to take home with me to give to my wife.