“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Just last night Jane sat up in her chair all night—literally—letting me put her on the commode at about 2 AM. I did so again at 7 AM, and she then sat up until Peggy arrived at 2 PM. Her legs are swollen like tree trunks from the fluid that has collected in them; her toes are like sausages. I’m very distressed at all of this. When I had to change the dressings on her ass this morning, before putting her back in her chair, I saw that the sores were worse than ever—an angry, irritated red—and spreading. Such is my wife’s pitiable state at this time.

(8:30. “I’m about ready to fall off the bed,” Jane said, going back into her disoriented state at once. Actually, she was leaning again to her left in the chair.

(9:07. Jane still spoke for Seth with her head down for the most part. Voice strong but muffled, eyes usually closed. “I found your face,” she said then, staring at me straight on. “I wanted to hold my head up—do something—because I’m so scared.” I helped her lean back against the pillow in her chair.

(9:30. “I’ll have to try something different now,” she said. “Try to think of something.... I’ve got to get up some—I know that—change position or something. You can help me there.” She kept repeating this until I grew irritated: “How in hell am I going to help you change position? You can’t move.” Finally, I pulled her cushion back in her chair as she sat on it. I do this occasionally. The movement, less than half an inch, I’d say, did change physical relationships of body to chair. Jane sat quietly, head down, eyes closed.

(I moved her in her chair over to the dining room table where we eat breakfast and watch TV. “That’s a good thought,” she said. Then: “I’m going to pretend I’m getting up in the morning. Can you turn the TV on a little?” I did—to Alec Guinness in the excellent TV movie, Smiley’s People, on channel 7. Once again I thought Jane looked like she might want to cry, but the moment passed. Now I sat on the opposite side of her, and she leaned away from me. “All I can say is, make believe you’re getting me up.”

(“Where you are,” she said cryptically. I thought she might be getting ready to erupt, but instead she sat finally with her face almost down to the tabletop. Then: “I’m safe here in the chair, but I’ve got to get back over there somehow.” She meant leaning to her left. But she was very restless. “All right, I’ll see what I can do this time.... I do it every morning—I’ll try to do it now,” she said, restlessly shifting from side to side in the chair. More and more I was concerned about getting her off her ass and into bed, but I was afraid to mention it yet. I turned off the television’s sound.

(10:01. Jane leaned so far to her left in the chair that I had to support her in it lest she overbalance the chair. She was still very restless. I thought the session was probably over.

(10:15. By now my wife had thrashed back and forth in her chair—not violently—telling me often that I had to help her; she certainly acted disoriented. “Don’t bother writing now,” she said, but when I stopped nothing came of it—no crying, or even talk. I moved her chair to the spot at which I sat at the card table, as she directed. A minute later I moved her back to her usual place at the dining room table, again as she directed. Silence. The movie on TV’s channel 2 was a bloody tale of youths being killed one by one by wicked, deranged men, near monsters, in dark summer woods.

(By 11 PM I’d moved Jane in her chair many times from position to position at each table. “Please, Bob, move me, move me, but don’t swing me so far out into the room, out in the middle like that....” But I had to, I explained, in order to be sure her chair legs cleared the table legs. Jane leaned far to her left again and again, yet didn’t topple over. Very gradually she seemed to calm down. There was a little shouting at me—very little—which I didn’t record, but no tears.

(The movements in the chair had to represent something in themselves—a shifting of attitudes—what else I wasn’t sure that quickly. Jane’s fear of being out in the center of the rug, away from a table she could lean on for support, could also represent her fears of abandonment, the casting away of old beliefs and fears. Often she insisted she knew what she was saying to me, but at times I felt that she didn’t, and even that some of it represented vocal dreaming. I did think that it was all therapeutic.

(I could see that her feet were badly swollen from all those hours—over 36—that she’d spent in her chair. So were her entire legs; the skin on them was stretched tight as a drumhead.