In the film "Heaven is for real" - which I highly recommend, by the way, if only for the absolutely adorable play acting of Connor Corum - little Colton Burpo after a Near Death Experience tells his father he met HIS grandfather in heaven. Shown a photo of the great-grandfather he never met in this life little Colton shakes his head, no, that isn't "Pop". His father who was very close to his Granddad runs to produce a picture of "Pop" when newly married. Colton starts the brightest of smiles "Yeah, that's Pop. Nobody is old in heaven."
Colton also in his NDE met a sister he hadn't known he had. His mother had had a miscarriage so early in the pregnancy they didn't even know the baby's sex. This girl, when Colton meets her 'in heaven' appears to be eight years old.
So, do people become younger 'in heaven' but some also become older?
I have heard from people who lost their twins in infancy and later in life met them some way or other, in dreams or in a coma, and these twins weren't babies any more but seemed to have grown alongside their twins living an earthly life.
I have also heard twins who lost their co-twin as adults tell they met them in a spiritual way after they passed and they "had grown so much".
What happens to us when time does not hold us in its clutches anymore? What becomes of our twins who died before birth? Will they be fetusses for ever? Will their hands and feet sink back into immateriality without having had the chance to grasp or walk? Who will they be if/when we meet again one day? What experiences will have shaped them whatever they are without the physical experience we go through? How can they be "young" without ever having become old? How can they become "older" without ever having been young like we were?
When I was young, having no idea I might be a twin, I imagined an older brother. He was always with me. I talked to him, I clung to him, I felt his presence like an arm around my shoulder.
I never imagined him to be my twin.
Since I know I was conceived but ot born a twin I have often wondered why twinship never played a part in my imagination. Could this be a sign I didn't have a twin after all?
I think not. By now, after 11 years of research, I still try to imagine what my life would have been like with a living twin, but I no longer struggle to "re-create" my twin into this life. In a way he wasn't my "twin" in the womb. Twin is a word from the outside, from post-birth life. It has no meaning in the womb. Like mother. There is no "mother" in the womb.
There is one all around it.
And there was no "twin" in the womb, there was just us, and we were the only "us" there was. No need to distinguish between twins and singletons and higher order multiples because all these things didn't exist.
We did. Exist. Very much. And we were just us.
My "imaginary brother" as a young child was very much like that. He just was there. I didn't think about the colour of his hair, for years I didn't even had a name for him. He was just there.
There were no names in the womb, either.
If the twin connection transcends death- and I'm very sure it does - my twin shares my experiences in this life, one way or the other. He feels, smells, tastes, moves through me feeling, smelling, tasting and moving. Likewise, I believe, sometimes, occasionally, I may experience something of a different kind of life through this connection. Something grander, more eternal, deeper, more real, even, than this life. Maybe...
I did not leave my twin back in the womb. He wasn't born with me, but he grew up with me, only on a different plane. But we didn't keep pace. Maybe it's my body slowing me down. Physicality with all its disadvantages, old age catching up with me, time and life wearing me down- all these things my twin never had to bother with (LUCKY YOU, TWIN!). After 55 years in this life and in this body I feel older and younger than my twin. Younger because I feel my senses and experiences are so very much limited compared to his. I'm a toddler crawling in the mud compared to an angel, I'm a caterpillar looking up to a butterfly.
At the same time I feel so much older. My creacking joints, my creasing skin, my greying hair, my tiredness, my decreasing vigour and energy, they all remind me of my age being a reality, while my twin feels so full of life and energy and ... yes, BOUNCE, as ever he did.
Suddenly Colton Burpo's view of 'heaven' makes sense. My twin is not a fetus any more. He grew out of being a mere potentiality to, not a person, that's reserved for this life, but something more, something just as much evolved from the potential state we had in the womb as I am, only on a different plane.
At the same time he isn't "old". No creaking joints, no greying hair for my beautiful twin. The vigour of youth is his if not youth in the earthly sense.
In Heaven nobody is old. But nobody is confined to the potential state of pre-birth or early infancy, either. Whether we evolve to our full being through this llife with a body or in some other way not visible to us, now, in the end we will be younger and older at the same time. Both of us. Like it is with twins.
