Resurrection Easter

This Easter, I am in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

I have been here for three months and will likely remain for three more, which is a long time to be away from home.

I am here at a neurological rehabilitation clinic called Spero Clinic because my daughter, following knee surgery six years ago, never fully recovered her ability to walk. Despite years of physical therapy, occupational therapy, neuro-occupational therapy, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab Pain Institute, anesthesiology, chiropractic care, and neurophysiology, she has spent much of the past year wheelchair-bound or bed-bound.

Fayetteville, for us, is the last stop on the Hope and a Prayer Express.

We are among others who, as a result of surgery, Long COVID, CRPS, POTS, dysautonomia, or other diseases, have lost critical functions. The waiting rooms have a good number of wheelchairs, and many carry young people.

This Easter, I find myself noticing a different kind of kinship to the idea of resurrection — to the functional reality of rising up. In the three months that I have been here, I have witnessed several people who were wheelchair-bound get up and walk for the first time in years.

A beautiful teenage girl from the United Kingdom arrived unable to walk after a sports injury triggered CRPS. Her family and community raised the funds to bring her here. She worked incredibly hard for months. Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the waiting room when she, surrounded by therapists and her mother, and still connected to a web of monitoring wires, stood and walked across the room. She has continued walking every day since. Now I often see her moving across the parking lot on forearm crutches. The simple act of walking to one’s car is, I am reminded, a stunning neurophysiological miracle.

A ten-year-old boy from New Hampshire arrived unable to walk or even sit upright after Long COVID. Last week, after months of therapy, I watched him take his first tentative steps. His parents celebrated by getting him a puppy named Cocoa. Now, when he sees me, he is not hunched over but upright — sometimes still in the chair and sometimes walking — and he asks if I would like to pet Cocoa.

When we first arrived, my daughter could walk forty-five steps at most.

Last week, when Target released its exclusive version of a new Melanie Martinez record, we drove there together — wheelchair in the trunk as always. She asked me not to bring the chair inside. She walked 245 steps to the record display and then back to the checkout counter.

Two hundred forty-five steps.

She asked me not to make a big deal about it, so I didn’t. But in my heart, and in this post, I am positively over the moon, teary, speechless.

In Catholicism, Easter is the big-ticket miracle: the stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, and Christians everywhere rejoice. This Easter, however, I find myself thinking less about the empty tomb and more about John 5:8, in which a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years is on the ground, begging for help. Jesus looks at him and simply says, “Pick up your mat and walk.” And he did.

That is the miracle I am holding close on this resurrection celebration.

Rise up, indeed.

Happy Easter.