Touch: The Journal of Healing - Issue 8 September 2011

This issue, more than any other to date, has had a tremendous impact on me personally because while we were accepting submissions and selecting which pieces to publish, my mother was dying. This made the reading of each poem or prose piece that touched on this subject a difficult one. Many times I could not finish my first read of the pieces because the emotions they evoked was too raw and too present. I didn’t have the luxury of time to distance myself from the pieces because I was living in their moments. Often, I had to walk away. As the days passed, I would recall a line from a poem, or a phrase that resonated with me during moments while I spent time with my mother. The overwhelming message of these pieces was that of being present in the moments we share with others, and while this is something that I knew from my clinical nursing practice and shared with the families of patients I have cared for, this message took on special meaning for me personally. As the days turned into weeks, I found new meaning in many of the submissions and my earlier overwhelming emotional response to many of them was no longer present because a bit of time had passed. As a result, I was able to review them with an editor’s eye while at the same time recognizing the truth in many of them because of my own experience. The loss of any one person reaches far beyond blood lines, and it is true for the family of poets and writers who have contributed to this journal. This past June, Larina Warnock, our Editor’s Choice for the May 2010 issue, and her family, lost their son , Zachary, who was the subject of several of Larina’s poems. In addition, one of the pieces contributoed by our Editor’s Choice poet for this issue was dedicated to Larina, and was written about Zachary. Because of this, Daniel and I are dedicating the September 2011 issue to Zachary, a member of Larina's family, from our family of writers. O.P.W. Fredericks, Editor