“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After lunch today, I showed Jane the last two poems she’s dictated at the hospital — those for July 25 and July 27. [...]

[...] And the fact that my wife is having a better night may mean something, or not … I’d told her this afternoon that I’d been prepared to receive a call from the hospital at any time, telling me to get my ass down there because my wife was failing and the end was near. [...]

[...] How different her singing is now from that very mournful Sumari song she’d recorded last February, a few days before going into the hospital. [...]

[...] She continued to doze, however, and I thought that the heavy meal was taking too much of her energy for digestion—reminiscent of the days when she’d first returned to the house from the hospital seven months ago. [...]

(In interpreting those passages, I saw that Jane would have died, given her own choice, a couple of years ago, but her plan was interfered with by me and the hospital personnel. [...]

The condition itself is an unfortunate aspect of the hospital environment, but you leapt to the conclusion that the very worst was involved. [...]

[...] Dorothy never did come down to see Jane for the reasons Seth mentioned—Cathy saw Jane a few times and that was that —Jane ended up in the hospital in a few weeks.)

[...] Neighbor John Bumbalo took delivery of the package yesterday afternoon while I was at the hospital, and brought it over as soon as he saw me drive into the garage. [...]

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.”

[...] When I wrote her about Jane’s latest hospitalization Maude, without mentioning her idea to me, suggested to her readers that donations would help Jane and me cope with our hospital bills. [...] St. Joe’s, as we called the hospital, had never dunned us for money in the past, and wasn’t doing so now. [...]

When Jane entered the hospital for the last 21 months of her life, I could run all I wanted to. [...] When I came home from the hospital for the last time in a year and 9 months, John went to Jane’s room 330 and very carefully gathered up all of the belongings and artifacts we had accumulated there and brought them to me in 1730: my paintings and drawings, the letters from readers that I had put up on the walls (the hospital never complained), the session notebooks for The Way Toward Health, our books and magazines and newspapers and clothes, the flowers and other gifts from readers and from some of the nurses—all of those things that seem to accumulate almost by themselves as one seeks to create a home wherever that may be.

Pardon me for using the phrase every so often, but as the years passed and after her two very brief stays in Elmira’s St. Joseph’s hospital, Jane finally came to be deeply skeptical of the value of conventional medical help. [...] The connections involving her mother’s bedridden condition and her tempestuous temper, including her suicide attempts, both faked and real, troubles with a succession of housekeepers, the lack of a father, the almost two years she spent in a Catholic orphanage while Marie was hospitalized, the death of her beloved grandfather, the whole strained atmosphere within which the gifted and impressionable child was growing, as well as her conflicts with church dogma and personalities, had, all together, powerful effects indeed. [...]

As I’ve written, Jane’s two short and fruitless stays in the hospital had left her deeply skeptical about the value of conventional medical treatment in her case. She was still most reluctant to return to St. Joseph’s, but when her symptoms became so severe that I could no longer care for her at 1730 she went back into the hospital in April 1983. [...]

(The hospital was hardly a quiet place, what with fire trucks and police cars pulling up beneath our window with sirens screeching and wailing, and with people in the hall outside 330 pushing carts that rattled and sounded like a bushel of pots and pans jouncing around — all of this as Jane was ready to begin the session. [...]

(4:26 p.m. This was Jane’s longest session, I think, since she’s been in the hospital. [...]

(“I don’t want to do that,” Jane said about the hospital idea. “I wouldn’t mind trying some things on my own, here at the house, like getting an eye, ear and nose doctor here, or an orthopedist—but no hospital. [...]

(“I’m not saying all of this to blackmail you into going into the hospital,” I told Jane several times. [...]

[...] And I found another check for $1000 in a letter, as a donation to Jane’s hospital-expenses fund. [...]

[...] I told Jane I hoped the whole episode served as a warning as to what hospitals were really like, and the well-meaning but misguided people who worked in them. [...]

[...] For if people “knew better,” then places like the hospital would be empty, and all the people in them would be working at other kinds of jobs. [...]

[...] She had been interrupted twice by hospital staff while delivering it. [...]

[...] Page by page, Jane presented her gift to me during the last year of her life, when she was hospitalized. [...]

[...] Then there’s Jane’s business and personal correspondence; much of her poetry; her journals; her unfinished autobiography; several novels she wrote before publishing the three Oversoul Seven books; the later essays she dictated to me, while in the hospital, about Seven’s childhood; her family history as far back as it can be researched; an objective biography of her physical and creative lives including her two marriages, and Jane’s and my struggles to survive before the advent of the Seth material. [...]

(Hospital staff caused Jane to break off the session twice. [...]

[...] In the meantime Jane called David Yoder at the hospital. [...]

[...] In fifth-grade history class, in the convent she’d been sent to because her mother was hospitalized for treatment of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Jane learned about Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who had been guillotined in Paris in 1793. [...]

[...] The hospital corridors are still very quiet. [...]

[...] After breakfast I called to see if the bank was open today, since I wanted to open the account for Jane’s hospital fund, but it was closed for Washington’s birthday. [...]

[...] On this level there will be hospitals and rest homes. [...]

[...] It goes without saying that the hospitals and training centers are not physical in your terms. [...]

A note added a month later: Jane’s journal entry is indeed a last one, for on the 26th of February, 18 days after finishing her work for Dreams, she was admitted to a local hospital for treatment of hearing difficulties, rheumatoid arthritis, and several other afflictions. Jane’s and my hospital experiences have already become so involved that I’ve begun to think of describing them—and whatever they may develop into—in a series of chronologically ordered introductory essays for Dreams, instead of the more conventional introduction I’d been expecting to write. [...] Each day as I look at my lovely wife lying in her hospital bed after years of struggle, I feel the surge of those events—and I see them in Jane, and feel them in her!

[...] With the hospital experience, I’m telling myself that if I can write about the storms of consciousness involving whole nations, I can certainly describe and reflect upon our own storms of consciousness. [...]

Although Jane has had intimations from Seth in the hospital, she hasn’t spoken for him, and I do not know whether she will or not.