On an operating table, you are technically alive, but the squadron of people involved in your surgery are keeping you in a state somewhere between life and death. A tube is inserted into your throat, your eyelids are taped shut, and the last thing you’re aware of is the countdown from ten to one. Depending on the surgeon, they might hold your hand as you go under. The entire process is, of course, terrifying. Even if you are fairly confident you’ll arrive in the recovery room, surgery is a foretaste of death.
And in the recovery room, things can still get dicey. People are vomiting, shouting, hallucinating and sometimes sobbing as the drugs wear off and they arrive back into their newly sutured and stitched bodies. Even coming to consciousness is a challenge. You haven’t had food or water for nearly a day, and the first ice chips and sips of juice can bring on waves of nausea. Someone will ask who’s waiting for you and be dispatched into a waiting room where a light up board has been informing your people of where you are – in surgery, in recovery. That person who loves you is escorted in to watch you struggling back to life. A doctor comes out in scrubs and says “it went well,” whatever that means. The person who loves you sitting by your side is also somewhere between life and death, in the twilight of not knowing who exactly it is they are looking at. Because even for some minor procedure, you will never be the same again. You have died a little bit. And you have been resurrected. Alive again, but permanently changed.
The Raising of Lazarus by Eduard Von Gebhardt, 1896. Via Wikimedia commons.
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In the recovery room after my cancer surgery, I remember a nurse who told me she’d been through something similar – maybe breast cancer too? And being told to bring a shirt I could put on without raising my arms. I remember looking down and seeing the chest binder the surgeon had wrestled me into, the surgeon herself smiling down, the snaking network of tubes twisting around my body, an aid helping me out of my surgical gown and into my hoodie and whispering “don’t look at yourself,” a wheelchair to the curb and struggling to remember the name of the nurse who pushed it so I could thank her, arriving home and having to sleep propped up in bed for weeks like an astronaut, the inability to walk more than a few steps, the first food my stomach could handle, falling asleep in front of the TV, the days before pathology results came in confirming the cancer was in my lymph nodes (“not what we wanted”), the surgeon calling to check in, drains hanging from my chest and trying to figure out how to shower with them, how to squeeze the ooze out of them, how to hide them when I dared to venture out in public, getting my long hair cut off just a few days after surgery so I wouldn’t watch it fall during chemo.
I had been resurrected, but soon I would be nearly killed all over again several times: Taxotere, Cyclophosamide, Odonsetron, Dexamethasone, Miralax, Immodium, Lorazepam, Filgrastim, Loratidine, Protonix, radiation delivered every single day from a monstrous machine that makes a sound like a dragon breathing, Mometasone, Abemaciclib, Anastrazole, Escitalopram, Famotidine.
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Cancer resurrects itself. The drugs can beat it back, but it feeds on bodies, and often outsmarts them. Every day is a reminder of this new life in a different body and a different mind and the incapacity to make plans for a future that might not exist.
When I got sick, I didn’t think much about feeling like Jesus when they brought me back. I thought instead about Lazarus. Lazarus didn’t ask to be resurrected. His distraught family members pleaded for his life. Imagine Lazarus, dead from some errant bacteria in the water or a scratch left unattended to fester or a common cold, peacefully dead, no longer in pain, no longer suffering. And Jesus says he will raise Lazarus so that people will believe Jesus is the messiah. What is Lazarus’ say in this? Martha, so dismissed elsewhere for being busy keeping the male apostles cleaned and fed, tells Jesus he didn’t get there fast enough, that Lazarus’ death is his fault, but eventually, she tells Jesus she trusts he’ll bring her brother back. And Jesus wept.
What does Lazarus say? How does he feel? In the artistic depictions I found online, he looks bewildered and upset. He shows up again in the gospel a few days later eating dinner, so like most of us who’ve been resurrected, he has his appetite back. But he will never be the same person again. Like those of us who had come close to death, his life is now divided.
Without Lazurus’ resurrection, Jesus does not get crucified and then there’s no Easter. But unlike Jesus, who wept blood and shook with anxiety and cursed and begged but trusted something was waiting on the other side, Lazarus died with no expectations. As a Jewish person, he must have believed he’d end up in Sheol, a shadowy container for souls. It’s a kind of spiritual waystation, closer to the Tibetan Buddhist Bardos than to Christian versions of heaven or hell. Sheol, in many ways, sounds like a surgical recovery room.
In the world of cancer, leaving the recovery room means encountering more pain, more treatment, more unknowns. You can imagine that Lazarus might have had some seriously mixed emotions, heading back into a world where he, too, might face crucifixion, or just the average Judean life of disease, life under an invading empire, religious persecution, poverty, hunger and thirst. He is alive again, but not by choice. And he will never again be the same.
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It seems to me that [Lazarus] would have been an object of great interest.{...}Thousands would have inquired of him about the other world;{...}His experience would have been vastly more interesting than everything else in the New Testament.{...}When he came to die again, people would have said: "He is not afraid; he has had experience; he knows what death is." Robert Ingersoll, 1892
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I won’t go to church this Easter. I didn’t last year – radiation – and this year family obligations and essay grading and political alignment of so many American Christians with the hard right and the churches nearby me being about as welcoming as tomb and a million other things are in the way of my becoming a person who goes to church on a regular basis any time soon. I think of myself as a Christian in exile, but not because I relate in any way to Jesus’ resurrection.
Jesus only has to deal with being back in his wounded, bleeding, resurrected body for a few days before he departs. Unlike those of us with cancer. Like Lazarus, we are stuck in these bodies for as long as we get to live. Lazarus probably watches Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection and ascension knowing that he will spend the rest of his life aware that for some reason he will probably never understand, he was yanked from the tranquil sleep of death and thrown back into a violent, painful, divided world. But the people who loved him were waiting for him there.