“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The kindnesses of others became especially helpful in all of those years that we went through the phases of Jane’s physical “symptoms,” as we called them—from our growing emotional questions and torment about them to success and relief and then through torment again and again. All of that, we gradually learned, proved to be one of the major challenges we had created and participated in, mixed in as it was with our other successes and failures.

Given our situation, I took care of my wife as best I could. As the years passed our lives became more and more restricted physically. It became increasingly difficult for Jane to walk in public. When we went food shopping, for example, she would sit in the car in the parking lot, perhaps reading, while I pushed the grocery cart up and down the aisles. We gradually gave up on vacations, in the usual sense of traveling. Strangely, the traveling aspect of the symptoms bothered us the least: we were too immersed in our daily lives with either full-time or part-time jobs (in the beginning), but always with writing, painting, the Seth material, ESP class, seeing friends, and so forth. Jane did conduct several quite successful long-distance experiments with the Gallaghers when they vacationed in the Caribbean Islands. We made dated notes and times of her impressions so she could check them when our friends returned. Interpreting the impressions was sometimes quite difficult. Jane did have direct hits listed, but for other impressions Peg and Bill couldn’t agree on the accuracy and/or timing of certain activities. And sometimes they said the impressions were just wrong.

Actually, outside of our own small group of friends, including ESP class members, plus the well-received articles Peg Gallagher had written for the Elmira Star-Gazette, Jane and I hadn’t stirred ourselves to become known in Elmira, even after the Seth books had begun to sell. In our own creative ways we had been loners, (as I still am) basically; our passions had been to focus on what we could learn both for ourselves and others in the long term, and especially through publishing to reach a larger audience. This became even more so for us as Jane gradually became more restricted physically because of her symptoms.

Often I think of the routines Jane and I settled into upon moving into 1730 in 1975. She was 46; I was 56. Now it seems that all of those years to follow passed in a flash. Routines, yes, but also ever-changing ones that still revolved around the simple elements of the work we loved and carried out amid the unexpected freedoms of living so much closer to the environment we had always taken for granted: the writing and painting, the sessions and mail, the publishing of books, the visits of friends and fans, some even from Europe. The hill house was the first property either one of us had ever owned, yet even within that loving context Jane gradually had more and more trouble walking even while the Seth material continued to grow in reach and flexibility, to attract a wider and wider audience. We saw deer in the back yard and put feed out for them and the birds. (The deer went into hiding during the hunting seasons.)