Lent, I could do. Easter, on the other hand, Easter was harder this year.

I had surgery to repair my fourth degree tear on March 5, the day before Ash Wednesday. A surgeon and a resident made their incisions and reached inside to repair what had been broken when my daughter was born. I had three procedures done in 3.5 hours–I will spare you the details of what exactly they did, but I will tell you that they used a chevron pattern for some of the sutures, or so the surgery notes later told me.

In the waiting room, the doctor told my husband they had been successful, more successful than he had originally thought would be the case. I didn’t hear any of this, of course, I was in the recovery room, with pain that wouldn’t let itself be tamed. I spent hours floating above and then crashing down into the pain, over and over again, as the nurse worked to find a combination of drugs that would keep the pain at bay. My hospital bill had a whole row of charges simply labeled “DRUGS,” expensive evidence, as it were, of the hours I spent wordlessly crying–suffering–in the recovery room. It’s a hazy memory, but a strong one, and I wonder if it will fade.

At my four week check up, I got a copy of my surgery notes. That’s when I learned I had been sewn up in a chevron pattern. I thought, that’s fun, a chevron pattern. I didn’t know sutures could be done that way. During the car ride home, I studied my surgery notes, trying to understand the complex medical jargon and mapping it to what I remembered or what I had been told. I read and reread them because I was curious and fascinated, I think, at this peek into the medical world, but also because I was still trying to make sense of what had happened that day when I was unconscious–present, but not there.

A couple days after my surgery, one of our priests made a house call to mark my forehead in a belated Ash Wednesday ritual. Although I deeply appreciated her visit, I didn’t really need the reminder of just how fragile we are, how mortal. Two years ago, on Ash Wednesday, I was pregnant and bleeding, hoping I wouldn’t lose our baby; this year, I was in bed, bleeding again, hoping now for a body restored.

My Lent was spent in bed, healing. It lined up neatly with the church seasons, I thought ahead of time. No need to search for a Lenten practice, my practice this year would be to heal and recover mindfully. I could do that. I picked out books to read, planned to make my way through the Psalms in a month, had my Book of Common Prayer at hand so I could say Morning Prayer from my bed on Wednesday mornings instead of with our little prayer group at church. The first two weeks were brutal and went by in a haze of pain and carefully timed opioids, with a Saturday night ER visit and an extra trip to the hospital clinic thrown in for good measure. I endured it with varying amounts of grace. I knew this would be hard, and it was, but I also knew I could make it through Lent because I could look forward to Easter.

But then the weeks passed, the forty(six) days of Lent passed, and I was still in bed. It became clear I would miss out on Holy Week and would not be in church for Easter. The foot washing would still happen on Thursday, Good Friday would be beautifully solemn and sober, the fire of Easter would be lit at the Vigil on Saturday night, the cross would flower on Sunday morning, and I would not be there to witness it.

I did receive communion that Easter Sunday, not at a beautifully decorated church with a choir and musicians and the people I know and love, but at home, on the makeshift sick bed in the living room. I took the bread and wine with mixed emotions: grateful my friend came by to give me communion and so extended our church community from the sanctuary up on the hill to my living room; sad that I wasn’t yet where I wanted to be and was going to be for a while yet. To be honest, I was more sad than grateful, but as I tasted the wine, I realized there was something else there, too. There was hope.

Hope because the familiar actions of the Eucharistic liturgy performed in my own living room reminded me that the resurrection does not depend on me. The resurrection happens whether I am feeling it or not, whether my body is whole or broken or somewhere in between. The resurrection doesn’t wait for me to be ready; the resurrection is, and there is hope in that.

As a former Calvinist, I know how to do Good Friday, how to feel the weight of my sins and sins of the world around me and contemplate the chasm between me and God. As an Episcopalian, I know how to do Easter Sunday, how to celebrate the resurrection and love in its purest form. But this year I am learning how to do Holy Saturday, how to wait in a liminal space, how to live in the in-between between hurt and healing, between death and new life.