“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

‘The hospital obviously represents the jumping-off point into another reality for Jane. She died in such an institution. But more often than not people go to hospitals to prevent their physical deaths, to stay away from realities like the one Jane is in for as long as possible. I also think that at this time in our history the hospital — any hospital — is a powerful social symbol for our species’ strengths and weaknesses. I use the hospital in a positive way by plunging out into the hall; I signal myself that I mean to keep on living physical.

Why do we have jobs at a hospital, when Jane was so afraid of them while she was physical? I interpret our employment there, and her joyful mood, to mean that from where she is now she no longer fears hospitals and the medical establishment — that she’s moved beyond that deep apprehension she began to build up around the age of three, as her mother became gradually, and permanently, incapacitated with rheumatoid arthritis. I think that my own much more pleasant earlier experiences with the hospital in Sayre, including my doing free-lance art work for some of its doctors, helped me place the locale for this adventure there, rather than at the hospital in Elmira, where Jane died. In addition, we lived very happily in Sayre for several years following our marriage.

October 10, 1984. Both of us had jobs at the large hospital in my home town of Sayre, Pa., eighteen miles southeast of Elmira, N.Y. The setting and the buildings weren’t like those of the “real” hospital in Sayre, though. It was a gorgeous summer day. Jane was much younger than she’d been when she died at the age of fifty-five. She still had her long jet-black hair, slim active figure and exuberant personality. I could have been my own age, sixty-five. We relaxed upon a large, sloping, very green lawn beside a brick hospital building that was several stories high. Then with great surprise I saw that on top of the near end of the building there sat an old, flat-sided, two-story house with steep roofs, weathered a drab gray and with all of its windows shuttered. Caught in one shutter was a filmy pink garment like a negligee, fluttering in the breeze. Curiously, Jane and I stared up at the house perched so incongruously there, and we talked about trying to get up into it to see what it was like inside.

After Jane’s death I became extremely busy. I had to cope with my grief, and one way I chose was to immediately begin keeping elaborate records in and writing essays for a series of “grief notebooks.” I told no one about the notebooks, or the three drawings I had made of Jane as she lay in her bed right after her death. I was obligated to spend many months finishing a Seth book — Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment — that we had started way back in September 1979, long before she went into the hospital; as I had planned to, I resumed work on that project the day after she died. (Jane was cremated the next day, in a process we had agreed upon several years ago.) I also worked upon two other books we collaborated upon after she had been hospitalized. There were many legal matters to attend to, much mail to answer, and more to keep up with.

A few nights following Miss Cunningham’s hospitalization, we went to visit her. We had never been inside the hospital before. [...]

[...] She became so violent that the hospital called and told us we’d have to move her. [...]

[...] “The hospital refused to keep her for even one more day, and that night we had her transferred.”

There followed a very confusing and, to me, upsetting several hours during which Jane and Don tried to make arrangements with Miss C’s doctor, relatives and a hospital. [...] Miss C’s family (nieces and nephews) finally said they would take the patient to the emergency room at the hospital; her doctor told Jane he would be waiting for her there. [...] Jane finally contacted another doctor who arrived at midnight and authorized Miss C’s hospitalization.