“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane’s symptoms consisted of a pervasive loss of flexibility—hardly noticeable at first, quite innocuous—that slowly over the years became more and more physically debilitating. Eventually she became unable to walk.

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.

A strong saving grace in all of the personal and household turmoil she lived in, Jane told me often, was her relationship with her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo, her “Little Daddy,” as she called him because of his diminutive size. Even as a youngster she had been well aware that she felt psychically connected to him. Joseph Burdo had become estranged from his wife, Minnie Finn, long ago. He was a man of few words, yet he nurtured in his granddaughter a love of nature that she was to cherish for the rest of her life. In Appendix 1, Volume 1 of The “Unknown” Reality, published in 1977, I partially quote Seth as saying that Joseph Burdo was “Part of a very strong entity. However, extremely inarticulate in his last life, due to an inability to synthesize gains in past lives… That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings....” He lived alone in rented rooms and worked at various jobs in town; he was a doorman, a watchman. He drank and gambled at the local casinos and played the horses at Saratoga Springs’ famous racetrack. He took Jane on walks in the nearby woods. “When he spoke of the wind,” Seth remarked, “she felt like the wind, as any child will unselfconsciously identify with the elements.” He died in 1949 at 68, when Jane was 20 years old.

Ed wanted to find number 92, the old double house that Jane had described to him as being her childhood home. We had crawled halfway along the avenue, between its dim corner streetlights, when my car’s headlights brushed over a shadowy feminine figure walking in our direction. Indeed, I was driving past the lady when Ed, looking back, exclaimed: “Hey, wait, Bob—that’s her! That’s Jane right there now. Pull over—” He was lowering his side window even as he spoke. Yes, it was Jane Zeh, expressing surprise in a clear musical voice at such a “chance” meeting as she came even with the car. I could see only part of her silhouette as Ed introduced us and told her I’d be working for him. Jane didn’t have a license to drive. She said that if she happened to be in Schuylerville during the day she’d stop in at Ed’s studio in town and say hello. (She did, but several weeks later.) Right then, she told us she was on her way to see her bedridden mother, Marie, as she often did at that time of night. She pointed out number 92, a few doors ahead of us. I said something innocuous to the effect that I looked forward to meeting her and her husband next Saturday night.

While we were surveying the house I saw a young black man step off the front porch and stroll out to the sidewalk. He didn’t turn to walk up or down the street, however, as one might expect, but casually stood there and turned to look at our group a few times as we talked and took pictures. Evidently we’d bothered at least one tenant after all, to the point of sending a sibling, say, to try to see what we might be up to, if anything. Perhaps deciding that we were no threat, our observer sauntered back into the house. I never did see anyone peeking out at us, though.

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.)

Another part of my routine at 1730, a somewhat selfish one I saw in retrospect, involved first walking and then running late at night. I’d always been active in sports, and later in dancing with Jane, but as her symptoms slowly deepened I became more and more reluctant to leave her alone except when I had full or part-time jobs. By the time we bought 1730 we could exist without my outside income for the most part as we concentrated on the Seth material. I had my chance, I told Jane: on other than session nights I was free to leave the house. I started out walking, but soon my nighttime excursions turned into running on those hilly streets in our neighborhood. Jane was reluctant to see me go out late at night, but I reassured her that she would be all right in the house and that I would be all right outside of it—and each one of us always was. My solitary treks became most enjoyable, no matter the time of year. I came to know intimately all of the dead-end streets opening off the main road, Coleman Avenue, like steps in a ladder that led up the hill to Pinnacle Road. I encountered wildlife on those streets. I told Jane that my record was six deer at one time. I stopped moving; they stopped; each side stared at the other in the porch light from a house across the street....

Jane and I lived in the hill house while she had her greatest initial successes with publishing the Seth material, and before she went into the hospital for good on April 20, 1983. Of course 1730 is still a large part of my life, as it is of Laurel’s, even while we use it for storage of all of the treasures it still contains: many of my paintings, files stuffed with records that are destined for the collection at Yale University Library, Laurel’s books and mine, and her records and possessions—all of those intimate signs of life that now seem suspended in our creations of space/time. Laurel came to live with me there on August 23, 1985, 11 months after Jane’s death. And may I add that she wasn’t enamored of my late-night running either. Now, at 83, I walk or run just about every day over the streets I knew so well as a child—only I do it in the daytime. It’s a treat, a privilege, to be able to do it each day. Then I do some painting. I have evenings free to answer mail and write and proofread books like this one. While I still feel the pull of all of those secret nighttimes out of 1730....