Changing Your Mind

I still remember reading Stephanie Hart’s Readers Write on “Changing Your Mind” in your December 2022 issue. I was moved by how she wrote about her relationship with her stepmother with sensitivity and poignancy. Then today, while reading the March 2023 issue online, I saw Robert Roth’s letter to the editor about Stephanie’s recent death. I clicked the link in Robert’s letter and found twelve more Readers Write pieces by Stephanie, dating back to 2006. I read them all, and afterward I thought of what Robert had written about how Stephanie had died with her partner beside her, “holding her hand, as her . . . breath stopped.” I’m grateful to get a glimpse of Stephanie’s life through her Readers Write stories and her friend’s letter.

Your December 2022 Readers Write on “Changing Your Mind” reminded me of a comment my daughter made when she was six years old. Her father had chastised her for changing her mind about what kind of sandwich she wanted. She looked at him calmly and said, “That’s what a mind is for — to change.”

My friend Stephanie Hart died in December. She was a longtime admirer of The Sun, and she frequently wrote about her life for the Readers Write section of the magazine. (Those pieces went on to form the foundation of her memoir, Mirror Mirror.) On the morning of her death, before I’d heard about it, I read her piece in the December 2022 issue [Readers Write on “Changing Your Mind”]. It ends with Stephanie, as a young woman, sitting in the hospital room with her dying stepmother — a person she once had a very fraught relationship with. “I was there when her breath stopped. Love was in the room, although we never called it that,” Stephanie wrote. I was reading those words at almost the exact moment her partner, Dave, was sitting by her bed, holding her hand, as her own breath stopped.