March 20th officially ushered in spring. Today welcomes Easter. Easter is a time for second chances, for new life.
Every winter our magnolia tree takes its hardest hits from ice. The ice builds up on the leaves, and the limbs unable to bear the excessive weight, break at the trunk. On freezing days, I’ll go outside and shake the limbs to free them from ice. Eventually the sun brings warmth and I watch with relief as the remaining ice turns to water and slowly falls from the leaves, in small drips, the way liquids behave in an intravenous tube administered to a patient. The tree responds by lifting its limbs.
In the spring some years ago, my daughter, Jenny, at age forty suffered a stroke. The affliction of the aging had been visited on the young; there was disorder in my universe. It was not fair. Things were not as they should be. When I saw her in the hospital her right arm and leg were unresponsive, two lifeless limbs extending from the trunk of her body. I wanted to shake them, like the magnolia, to keep them from being broken. I tried praying, but my soul felt numbed, frozen solid inside my chest.
I sat dazed by her bed. Hospital time proceeds at a slow pace like chilled syrup pours from a bottle; slow, heavy and viscous. Jenny was sedated with a tube in her. I counted the liquid’s drip in the intravenous tube, beginning from one to ten and then I’d start over again. I needed this exercise to focus so I wouldn’t feel the panic that kept welling up in me like hiccups. I could hear nurses out in the halls. They chatted about their children, their husbands, boy friends, and about their plans for dinner. One said she would not have spaghetti another night, maybe for the rest of her life. Another announced she’d dumped her boyfriend. “It’s about time,” her friends cheered, approvingly. They were about their lives. Were they aware of mine? Did they care about Jenny’s?
I envied them. Then I resented them. How could they be so casual? Didn’t they know about my daughter, her stroke? How could they go on like this when my daughter’s life, her future, was hanging in the balance? Being so scared makes the whole world seem as though everything should be all about me and about those I care for. Life was going on in the hallways as if I was not there and my fears for Jenny did not exist. I hoped my daughter’s lifeless limbs would be healed. I didn’t know.
The doctor came. He told me there was good reason to expect she would gain some control of her injured limbs. He could promise nothing, but he was cautiously optimistic.
He said that after strokes, some neurological circuits break. The brain can behave like dammed up water; if it can’t send its flow one way, it often finds another path to direct its flow of signals. The brain has a mind of it’s own. It will do what it will in its own good time. It’s maddening, the waiting “for its own good time,” counting the drips and having to accept what’s going on was completely out of my hands.
The old spiritual says that God “has the whole wide world in his hand.” Forget about the whole wide world; is God holding my daughter’s lifeless hand? If he could just take her hand in his and make it better. It’s the waiting, the interminable waiting and all the thoughts you never thought you had and they surface like the opaque bubbles rising from the bottom of a muddy marshes. My thoughts surprise me. I’m childish, petulant, self-centered. I’m scared.
In the next few days I settle down and surrender to the rhythm of healing. I don’t fight it any more. I let myself go with the flow, let Jenny’s mind and limbs do what they must. Jenny is talking now. She’s bewildered.
One day I see her hand turn and her thumb move slightly. I say, “Look!” She looks at her hand. She tries moving it more. Nothing happens. Slowly she orders motion and the limbs respond slightly. There’s hope. In the midst of tears I feel waves of gratitude and I know Jenny has been delivered, as if her lifeless limbs had risen from the grave to live again.
There’s a story in the bible about Jairus that I’ve come to love since all this happened. I read the account very differently now than I did years ago before Jenny’s stroke. Jairus, an ecclesiastical figure, is distraught over his daughter’s illness and fearing his daughter will die (or perhaps is already dead) seeks Jesus, asking him if he would come and heal her. “Jesus took the damsel by the hand and she was well.” It’s the part about taking her hand I find the most moving. I’m grateful.
Jenny has use of her right hand and leg. There’s a residual limp, but hardly noticeable. She can use her right hand if she must, but during recuperation, she learned to depend more on her left. In the big picture she is well and happy today.
I have an image of her. It warms me the way spring does. She is going into the house that she recently bought. She turns to us and rummages in her purse and with her right hand takes the key, puts it in the lock, turns to her stepmother and me, smiles and enters the house for the first time as its owner.
Happy Easter.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Elizabeth Freedlander says
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Harry Bainbridge, former Rector of Christ Church Easton, one said. ” I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Chrisr because I have seen forms of death in addiction, failed marriage, serious illness, depression, PTSD and other darkness from which people are resurrected to courageous, transformed lives and live in light. Jenny’s story reminds me of this.