This week, we mourn a death in our family, a matriarch of sorts, who has been there ever since we were born. We didn’t necessarily visit them often, but we loved and admired them just the same and took comfort in knowing we could turn to them if we needed them.

While Lincoln County Healthcare keeps reminding us that St. Andrews hasn’t really closed and many of its services remain, they can’t convince most of us that it’s true.

We still have a limited emergency room (all we have to remember is to be sure we need it during the daytime or early evening hours and that any transport via ambulance goes directly to Miles) and we still have our family care center.

We’ve already lost our friendly medical staff and a warm hospital bed if we get the flu, break a leg, have a heart attack, or are near death and need 24-hour care. St. Andrews earned a reputation many years ago as “the” place to be if you wanted a nursing staff that would go above and beyond essential services.

In many instances, these staff members were our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, or neighbors. Patients took comfort in knowing someone was keeping a close watch on them, a personal touch often impossible in a large medical facility.

Even our summer residents frequently chose to have medical procedures completed here at St. Andrews rather than “back home” because of the special attention they felt existed here.

Over the years, we’ve watched the slow, orchestrated death of our beloved St. Andrews with great sadness, a takeover a long time in the making. Our hats are off to the dedicated folks who have fought long and hard this past year to save St. Andrews.

Small hospitals are struggling, to be sure, and can’t begin to offer the services they once did, but St. Andrews had one thing very special going for it — community support. Folks here on the peninsula have put their hearts and soul (and money) into making it work for more than 100 years because it wasn’t just another hospital; it was theirs, even though they knew they didn’t actually own it.

Few hospitals can boast the level of community support that we’ve experienced here over the years. In our opinion, Miles would have been a whole lot smarter to headquarter most of its services in Boothbay Harbor rather than Damariscotta to take advantage of this community support, a true key to success.

Many years ago, when Miles first began to wine and dine St. Andrews by convincing them that it made good sense to combine many of our services, we didn’t realize that it meant we’d come out on the short end of the stick.

St. Andrews was never chosen as the headquarters for any of these new services; it was always Miles. It only took a few short years to give up nearly everything we’d had for decades even though Lincoln County Healthcare constantly reminds us we’re retaining most of our services. We say “bull.”

In hindsight, we know now we should have fought back immediately when we learned a single board of directors was to serve both facilities. It appears nobody was protecting our back or fighting for us, but rather making decisions, which they termed in the overall interests of good healthcare. Wrong.

To make matters worse, we’re now faced with a substantial tax investment every year as well as an anticipated added personal charge for transport due to the longer distance just to keep our beloved ambulance service afloat. That, too, may have to fight for its very survival.

We will end by saying that precious few of us predict the survival of Miles because of this takeover; we think they’ll get eaten up by other area hospitals in the coming years because, like it or not, they’re a small hospital, too.

St. Andrews, in our estimation, would have survived for another 100 years, thanks to the loving, caring community. We would have had limited services, granted, and folks would have had to turn to the large medical centers for specialized medicine, but that’s always been the case, and we all accepted it.

Unfortunately, Miles has lost the support of the Boothbay peninsula and we fully expect many of its residents, both year-round and summer, will look elsewhere for in-patient hospital care because of their disgust with how this entire takeover was handled. No amount of good PR on their part, which is way, way too late, is going to repair the damage.