This year, my husband and I attended the Easter Vigil service for the first time in years. We hired a sitter for the girls, as the hours-long service would extend late into the evening, and we were planning to bring them to the Easter Sunday service the next morning. I love the bonfire outside, the large Easter candle being lit at dusk and the sanctuary gradually filling with light as each parishioner enters with a small candle which has been lit from the master flame, the sanctuary soon aglow with hundreds of dancing lights. The priest intones the prelude to the Mass by candlelight, and as we traverse the scriptures from Genesis to the risen Christ, the lights come on and the choir bursts forth with the long withheld "Alleluia!" New members are baptized and confirmed, the light of Christ and the Holy Spirit glowing afresh in them.
As I observed the proceedings from my place in the choir, I recalled my husband's and my baptism and entry into the Church twelve years ago. Our years of infertility and miscarriage came to an abrupt end shortly thereafter, and our first daughter, who was conceived during the light-filled days following our baptisms, became our own Easter miracle when she was born the following January.
Our second daughter joined our family through adoption three and a half years ago. She brought her own unique light and spirit, a light that was nearly extinguished during her first year of life as a premature baby abandoned at a government hospital in Gulbarga, India. Fed watered-down formula that barely kept her alive, she actually developed marasmus--protein starvation, which results in severe muscle wasting--in the hospital. Three pounds at birth, she weighed only seven pounds at six months of age, and ten pounds at a year. She had by then been transferred to an orphanage in Bangalore that was sponsored by Holt International, where she received the nutrition and therapy to begin to thrive, but she had the developmental level of a two-month old. It was uncertain if she would ever walk or talk, and there were concerns that she would be profoundly mentally disabled.
Now six and a half years old, she is an exuberant force of nature, definitely walking and talking and most definitely NOT profoundly mentally disabled. She does, however, have lingering effects from her hard start in life, loosely defined as developmental delays accompanied by sensory processing disorder and attention deficit disorder. When she came home at age three and a half, she still had the Frankenstein walk of a toddler, and her fine motor skills lacked the refinement to confine her scribbles to the page or reliably steer her utensils to her mouth. Her vocabulary consisted of six words, a few signs, and lots of pointing and babbling. She has made steady progress with the help of physical, occupational, and speech therapists, and can now run around the playground with her kindergarten playmates and speak in mostly understandable short sentences. Yet there is a struggle to control her body and words, an intensity of effort that her classmates don't share. It is at times exhausting for her. Her brain is working so hard. And perhaps that's why it shorted out on Easter Sunday halfway through Mass.
Miss Wiggle-Worm was boinking from lap to lap during the homily, as is her custom. She was sitting on my lap facing me, and after a few minutes decided she wanted to move over to Papa's lap. She had only been there a short time when she suddenly got a distressed look on her face, then stiffened and arched backwards, her eyes simultaneously rolling up in her head. My husband said if she'd been lying on her stomach on the floor she would have been rocking back and forth like a rocking chair. He stood up and alerted me that something was wrong. I took one look and hurried over to our friend who is a nurse, and beckoned her to come. I don't know who first said the word "seizure"; I think it was me, as I'd seen them occur in children before. Our friend concurred, and suggested we take her down to the ER for followup. She was by now conscious again, but was acting groggy and a little irritable. I asked a friend to pack up our instruments and music and other items, then zipped down to the ER.
I have a lot to be thankful for this Easter, as the CT scan they performed showed no sign of a brain tumor as a causative factor. I knew a tumor was a possibility, and it was a relief to rule that out. One seizure does not a "seizure disorder" make, so we were told to follow up with an EEG and possibly an MRI, and were informed that medication wouldn't be considered unless she had a second seizure.
By the time we left the ER, the light was again dancing in our daughter's eyes. She wanted to dye Easter eggs when we got home, as I'd left the eggs and dye sitting out on the counter for when we returned from church. We enjoyed coloring the eggs together with her big sister, and I was grateful that we were enjoying this annual family tradition together so soon after the morning's medical drama. We decided to keep our plans to go to a friend's house for an early Easter dinner, but she grew groggy and fell asleep in the car on the way there. Although she awoke when we arrived, she was so tired she used my husband's folded up flannel shirt as a pillow at the dinner table and didn't eat anything. She fell asleep and slept for a couple of hours, then went to bed shortly after arriving home, logging an impressive 15 hours of sleep altogether. Her little brain was obviously tuckered out.
This Easter will always be memorable; it won't blur together with Easters before or after. I found more meaning in the messages of resurrection, light, and hope than I have on other Easter Sundays. And as I looked into my daughter's eyes as she clutched my husband's arm in the ER, I felt like the mystery of life was no mystery at all: Love as perfectly as you can, as long as you can. And while you do, the light of Easter will be impossible to extinguish.
What a corker!
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