1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 2 monday april 5 1982" AND stemmed:new)
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
As far as I can see, I’ve been living with two sets of “facts” for some years. The old established explanations had faltered, and finally seemed almost incomprehensible, while the new explanations of Seth seemed beyond my reach, at least in certain areas—areas that were vital to physical and psychic peace. The same processes appeared in my husband Rob’s life, of course, as our lives seemed to impinge into the area of man’s greatest hopes, and into the opposite area of his greatest fears.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
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.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]