The Heart Folds Early by Jill Christman

Dear Jill Christman,

I don’t believe that I’ve ever heard, read, or learned of someone taking such an honest approach when discussing death with young children, and I would like to thank you for your frankness.

You write the following about telling your daughter about her Baby Brother’s passing.

‘Your baby brother doesn’t have a body anymore, sweetie. He’s dead. Dead means you don’t live in your body anymore.’

For a long time, again, Ella said nothing.

“‘Okay,’ Ella said. ‘Okay. My baby brother can slide down the tree and I will catch him because he doesn’t have any feet.’

The wind picked up and shook the leaves. The whole world was a trembling green” (187).

I find it interesting that you write about your husband telling your daughter about Baby Brother living “in the sky,” yet this is not where the discussion ends. This memoir is as much about you dealing with a late-term medical abortion as it is about navigating the grief, loss, and processing of your family members.

On the 180-degree change from a want to feel empty to a desire to feel whole, you write, “Only now can I see that my teenage compulsion towards emptiness was the opposite of how I was feeling as we tried for another baby: I wanted to feel full again. I was done with emptiness” (205). 

A teacher’s pet and perfectionist in high school (and a woman, this is important!), I was regularly seated next to groups of rowdy teenagers. In Spanish class, wedged between a curly-haired sixteen-year-old who refused to participate in a group project and his football-playing friends, I waited for my turn to share how many children I wanted. The football and field hockey players expressed their desire for large families — each with no fewer than two children. 

“No quiero ningún niño,” I said, to a room full of blank stares and slightly slack jaws. I do not want any kids.

“You don’t want any children?” the slacker, who sat next to me, asked in English.

I shook my head. No.

I did not know how to — nor did I want to — divulge to my classmates that I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into the world with the mental health issues I’d been battling since I was thirteen. I wanted to feel empty and alone because I could not envision a future when I would be healed enough to take care of another person the way a parent should.

My perspective on being a parent has shifted since then, but I can empathize with and understand the impact that trauma has on the body and its perceived fullness.

You write that you remind your students that “Life doesn’t come with plot” (24). This is something I wish I could refute — that I think most people wish they could rebuke. 

Many women with the capacity for pregnancy believe we know exactly how we’d react if we found out we were withchild, but we do not — as you explore in your memoir. We do not know exactly how we would handle a pregnancy, whether planned or unplanned. I did not foresee the loss I have experienced thus far in my life, nor did you predict yours.

I want to say that we are sitting ducks — beings that will have to make game-time decisions when serious, life-altering events cross our paths (and they will cross our paths) — but I think we are more like hermit crabs. We have our shells, our belief systems, before we are caught by the tides, but we might have to pick up a new shell, or a new set of conceptions, as we grow older.

In a conversation we had back in October, when the leaves were just past orange in the Midwest, but the temperature was still scorching for me in Florida, you said, “I decided it was my responsibility to tell the stories that are sometimes really scary to tell.” The Heart Folds Early is living proof that “writing the hard stuff” can have a real, emotional impact, especially in an environment that seeks to hide stories of miscarriages, abortions, and reproductive justice.

Thank you for telling The Heart Folds Early. I look forward to its well-deserved release.

Very sincerely,

Carlin Steere