“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(One of my first thoughts was that the dreaded time had come—that no matter what Seth had been saying lately, or what Jane and I thought about her getting better, she was actually worse off than ever. I envisioned calling Dr. Kardon tomorrow, to get Jane into the hospital—a prospect both of us shrank from indeed. I thought that even my wife would be forced to agree to such a move.

(8:36. Voice better, head moving up and down, grimacing and gesturing during delivery.)

(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.”

(9:46. I moved her back to the other table. The TV was turned up. “I’m trying so hard to get back over there,” Jane said, “in a certain fashion....”

(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.

(11:15: I told her that I’d soon be moving her into the bedroom. She didn’t react, as I’d feared she would, merely asking that I wait a bit. Not that her resistance would have done her any good.