“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Yesterday, Sunday, had marked the end of Jane’s first week home from the hospital. We’d found it to be an exceedingly difficult one for a number of reasons. “The toughest week of our twenty-seven years together,” I told a neighbor last night. To see my wonderful, lovely wife so reduced to her present near-helpless state was almost more than I could bear. Jane herself was displaying a stoicism (I’m afraid to write “acceptance”) regarding her condition that I’d have found unendurable were I the one experiencing it. I reacted very badly at times, I’m afraid, alternating profound moods of despair with those of great tenderness, love, and compassion. I wanted to cry and could not. With a more painful heart I yearned for my wife to walk to me, hips innocently and joyfully swaying, as she used to do years ago, when she’d meet me every day as I left the printing company where I worked as a commercial artist. That had been shortly after we married, in 1954. We were living in Sayre, Pennsylvania, a middle-class railroad town in which I’d grown up, which lies only 18 miles southeast of our present home in Elmira, New York. Not that I wanted Jane to be magically transformed into a 25-year-old again—just that I ached to see a resurgence of that uninhibited, unplanned joy of motion for its own sake. For now I understood that freedom of motion was at least one true reflection of an individual’s creative potential.

Our week just past had been filled with a desperate energy as we struggled to get settled so that we could return to “work”—to our arts—on some sort of a regular basis. To our dismay, we discovered that Jane had lost much of the use of her legs while in the hospital, since during that month she’d been actively discouraged from using them in her accustomed way. This complicated enormously all of our efforts to help her move about the house as she used to in her office chair, which is on rollers, and nearly signaled the failure of our efforts to live by ourselves. We’d scheduled just a two-hour visit by a registered nurse five afternoons a week for Jane’s physical therapy, and to change the dressings on her decubiti. Neither of us wanted live-in help on the premises 24 hours a day. I, for one, was afraid that such an arrangement would not only demonstrate our acceptance of the fact that Jane was really caught in a terrible, permanent situation, but that it would end up destroying us psychologically and creatively.

Jane struggled to regain strength in her legs. Without being aware of it, I’d begun to lose weight after she was admitted to the hospital, and by now my loss had reached the point where others began to notice it. Deliberately I began to eat more. I became extremely busy after my wife came home, making what seemed like endless calls and trips about getting prescriptions filled, about trying out various kinds of beds and mattresses and chairs and hospital gowns, about insurance, about a commode, about having a speaker phone hooked up to our regular phone so that Jane wouldn’t have to hold the standard bulky handset to her ear. We even had a small remote-controlled television set installed in our bedroom so that she could watch it, say, when she was restless during the night. When I began sleeping on the couch in the living room, where it was quieter and darker, we bought a pair of wireless intercoms so that Jane could call me from her bed at any time. We also made some rather expensive mistakes, buying certain equipment that proved useless to us.