“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.