Editor’s Note | Issue 8

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to how we love people with illness and through illness.  Perhaps it is because this issue comes as a member of my family finds himself in the hospital, extremely ill.  Perhaps because there are just so many submission pieces that scream out their grief as the ones that are ill and experiencing these varying levels of love, or they are the person stuck on the outside of their loved one and don’t know how to approach it.  Common themes and feelings I found myself grappling with as I made my way through the submissions for this eighth issue.

I, myself, suffer from mental illnesses and have for years. They will be lifelong.  It is through that lens that I’ve always wondered about love and illness, specifically, how someone could love me through my own struggles.  Selfish?  Probably.  Self-involved?  Most likely.  But humans are often self-involved creatures.  As I said, I viewed these ideas through my own lens of being the one who needed to be loved.  I had not given much thought to being the person on the outside needing to love someone through their own struggles.  Looking at where I am now, perhaps I should have. 

The entirety of this issue has stood with me through the journey of sitting beside my father as he grew steadily more ill, finally got sick enough to warrant multiple hospital visits, and then into major surgery, and finally, as I sit to write this editor’s note, into recovery and rehabilitation.  Every facet of selecting and editing these pieces for publication was done at my father’s bedside–in uncomfortable chairs and cold, loud rooms with constantly beeping machines. The effects of these events will be lifelong for him.  And my family.  The events that he does and does not remember as everything culminates will follow us.  We all approached this illness differently.  We all approached loving him through his illness differently.  And this settled within me as I approached these submissions and sought out a unifying theme. 

This issue is not about me however, or the personal journey my loved ones and I will make.  I only start this note like this because I feel that a note before a body of work should tell the reader something.  It should provide a possible lens or explanation to the reader as they make their journey through a body of work.  That is what I hope to do here. 

Through sorting and editing these pieces, I found common themes of loving someone–the lack of love a person with illnesses receives, be it by their close connections or by an uncaring society such as in Gary Moak’s piece, Mercury Descending, where the narrator spends the time discussing an elderly neighbor that’s “easy to overlook, almost invisible, a faded old man in front of a run-down house…” and how his wife believes the older neighbor has no place within the world of their neighborhood. The giving and then slow removal of love such as in Olivia Omalley’s Sick Friends, where the narrator is sick and pleads for gentle understanding, “[p]eople held strong for the first six months, with perky visits and gift baskets, but over time their compassion ran out.  I felt uniquely alone and I longed for this fact to be understood”.  Or the devastation of loving someone, going through everything only for them to desecrate the very love you offer them–knowingly or unknowingly.   And perhaps the most haunting idea of the love for oneself that declines and vanishes in Galen Cunningham’s Divine Madness, “For I am a former ghost of myself and not yet the ghost I will be.  My madness made and crushed me…”.

Every piece included in this issue was gone over, edited, and selected with care.  Each story and poem–both mentioned by name in this note and not–show love and illness intertwined.  They show the depths that love can go to and even what the absence of love can do.  These pieces range from personal experiences to a grander societal reflection.  But each of these pieces deal with the realities of loving someone through an illness and even beyond one when sometimes, loving them isn’t even enough in the end.  With this in mind, no matter where you lay on the spectrum of love and grief, we welcome you to our newest issue.

Thank you for taking a chance on us and our journal.

Jacquelyn Stafford

Deputy Editor-in-Chief & Submission Manager

Réapparition Journal