This much I know to be true...

Some years ago I came upon an entry in a forum about early twin loss. A member told how she went to a meeting and one of the attending guys said "other than you I know for sure I had a twin sisterr. She died at our birth." The author of the post wrote how she reacted. "I also know it for sure."
Still, all her surety came from family constellation and kinesiology, and I can name more people than I have fingers and toes who would NOT call that "knowing for sure".
There is a fair number of things we early loss twins can do to gain confirmation that our twins really existed and I did most of them.

1. Medical confirmation. Blessed are those who were conceived after the advent of ultrasound, they will have pictures of their twins. Not very clear pictures. Possibly only two black spots on a grey surface, but pictures all the same. If your mother remembers details about her pregnancy and delivery, more may surface. Bleeding through the pregnancy. Talk of two possible heartbeats. Unusual gain of weight. Heavy or early child movement. An unusually big placenta. Tissue in the womb. Signs on the placenta that point to anther umbilical cord originally attached to it. An actual fetus papyracaeus. There are differing opinions as to whether dermoid cysts or teratomas refer to a vanished twin or are rather pluripotent cells going haywire early on. Double organs like four kidneys or organs of both sexes in one individual. More than five toes or fingers. Obvious chimerism. Chimerism proven through DNA tests. A fetu in fetu (a fully developed embryo found in a live individual).

2. Emotional confirmation. When Althea Hayton started her Wombtwin Suvivor project she developed a questionnaire that listed several emotional  traits supposed to point towards in utero twin loss. Among them are ovious ones - buying two of things, being unable to be alone, being averse to people approaching from one side - and less obvious ones - feeling alone in a crowd, looking for something without knowing what it might be, yearning for a soulmate - things everyone may experience once or often in live. Emotional residues of in utero twin loss may be immensely powerful but it's difficult to apply them to twin loss directly. They may also point to other traumatic experiences like being separated from the mother shortly after birth for a stay in the NICU, or traumatic events in early childhood.

3. Spiritual confirmation. Many early loss twins set great store by that. Do kinesiological muscle test. Meet a psychic. Family constellation. Hypnosis. Ask a pendulum or a crystal ball. There is literally no limit to spiritual technics. Like with emotional confirmation there are other suspects present which can not always be clearly distinguished from a lost twin. Earlier reincarnations. Trauma transferred over generations. Twin-flames rather than an actual twin... Depending on the spiritual healer's preferations there is literally no limit to possible explanations, which can be frustrating if you just wanted to have your twin confirmed.

Like I said, I did most of those. I pressed my mother for the last drop of information. Like a lemon. She tried to produce as much as possible but given the complicated nature of our relationship I can't even be sure if she didn't produce memories just to satisfy my expectations. Fact is, I was her first child and much has happened since.
She suffered from nausea for most of the pregnancy. Only in month 8 did she start to feel better.
(A twin pregnancy produces much more HCG, the hormone suspected to cause pregnancy sickness).
There was talk of two heartbeats at some time (no ultrasound in 1963).
She "lost a lump" on the toilet in winter 1963, thought "that looks like a tiny arm" and flushed the toilet.
She was hospitalised in March 1963 for suspected preecclampsia, but doesn't remember much of that. When she was discharged her cervix was partly opened and she was told to take it easy but not ordered to bed-rest.
She had very heavy child movement. 
I took 38 hours to be delivered.
The placenta was so huge the midwife said it "would have suited two".
She had to go back to hospital to have a D&C shortly after delivery.
I was a difficult child hard to comfort.

I never really bonded with anyone, not even - or least of all - my mother.
I resented touch from an early age on, before I could walk.
I never knew how to play with other children.
I chose objects to talk to ( a hand broom, later toys).
When my younger sister was born - I was 3 - I said "I don't want her, I want another brother." I had a brother 14 months younger than me.
I talked to someone nobody could see, but it wasn't an imaginary friend.
I often said "we" when I talked about myself.
I was - and am - in striking dissociation with my own body. I sometimes don't know where my arms and legs are.
I never had friends but was always in dialogue with someone invisible.
I learned to read very early (age 5) and prefered books about brothers.
I wrote stories about brothers.
A did a striking water-clour drawing at age 4 or five of two identical girls rope skipping. One has both feet in the air, her features are slightly blurred and she is laughing fit to burst. The other one has one foot on the ground. Her expression is more sober and her features are more clear. Her skirt has black stripes which make it look more grounded.
As a young child I used to dream I was somewhere I was not supposed to be and had to look for a way out. I always feel I'm in the wrong place or just plain wrong.
I never developed trust in life.
I have flash-backs which point to an in utero trauma like cord entangling or being in the same amniotic fluid with a mazerating dead fetus.
...

My mother asked a psychic who told her I had had a twin sister with whom I was still very closely bonded.
Another psychic told me I did not have a twin, but was a reincarnated witch from the middle ages.
Another psychic told me I had had a twin sister who was long gone.
A kinesiologist told me I had had a twin sister and a twin brother. Triplets.
I once had a very weird dream about me and another one sitting on a window shelf and tumbling down to different directions, I to safety, my twin to death. I woke up with a piercing headache, fell asleep again and had exactly the same dream again. This happened only once in my life (so far).
I always had the feeling of a presence with me I talked to. When I became a Christian, I thought "it must be Jesus or my Guardian Angel" and I was sincerely frustrated when this thought didn't satisfie me at all.

And that's it. I have tried for several years to find out more, but there is a limit to accessible information. I have begun to accept I will not find out more by going through everything I know again and again.

This much I know to be true, and confirmation will not come from the outside. Neither my mother nor assorted psychics will provide the kind of confirmation I so long to receive. Confirmation can only come from the one person who was there:I  myself. My body, my senses, my soul - they are the sources I can turn to again and again and will gain - step by step - more information about what I already know: I had a twin who died before birth.

WhatsApp in utero!

Imagine one of my daughters said to me "I can't find my key!" I would start looking for her key. I wold turn cushions, crawl under chairs and tables, shake up jackets and bags looking for her key. All to no avail.
Then suddenly my daughter says "oh, by the way, it's not a key exactly. It's my chip-card for the garage at work."
So, in a way it's a key, because it opens doors, but actually it's a plastic card. No wonder I didn't find it. All the time I had the image of a metal bar with a zig-zag pattern in mind. There is no way how I could have found my daughter's key with this mental image as a pattern for the search.
Now I can turn a book and find the card lying beneath.

We can't search for something without an idea of what we are looking for.

I was always searching. For what I didn't know. The adults had many ideas. They thought I was looking for attention. For challenges. For friends. For an identity. For roots. For safety. For a family.
All those were things I lacked to one amount or the other in my life and I thought that's what I was looking for a long time, too.
Until I received attention and my search wasn't over.
Until I had a family of my own and still felt lost.
Until I had met challenges and still wasn't satisfied.
Until I had found a person who called himself my friend and I realised I was longing for a message by him...
...and when I received it the longing wasn't over.

When I found out I probably had a twin who died before birth, I - and many others - said "well, that explains a lot." It's my twin I'm looking for.
I had an idea of what it means to be a twin. I read books. I talked to other twins and twinless twins. I was sure I was looking for someone I'd be connected with, in sync with, who looked like me, whom I felt in tune with, somehow...

Ah, the others said, you're looking for a soulmate. Well, don't we all!

It took me some years to be sure that I don't. Actually it took me until the advent of WhatsApp in my life to realise what I'm looking for.

There's nothing more similar to life in utero with a twin than WhatsApp. I send a picture. An emoji. A single word. I just reach out and signal "hey, there! I'm using WhatsApp!" And all I receive and all I NEED is a thumbs up back, another emoji, a smiley. I send an impuls, I get an impuls back. Twin existence in the womb.

I realised I'm not looking for chats, pranks, adventures shared. I see my children having these with their friends and I envy them that, but it's not what I long for. I'm anxiety-ridden when it comes to social interaction and, frankly speaking, a soul mate to have long and intimate talks with would make me crazy within a very short time. The burning hole inside my existence which is shaped exactly like the thing I need and miss and look for - it tells me what it was: an unspoken, non-verbal, un-questioned existence next to another one. No exchange of words and ideas, not much physical contact - my twin very probably died before there was much of that - but the constant presence of someone. Not even always comforting, it may be annoying, too, like a pebble in my shoes.

When we know what we are looking for we know what we are missing. Not the other way round. And we can't EVER look for something we don't know.

Books on twinloss N° 13 "One" by Sarah Crossan

"One", published in 2015 has been heaped with praise, and rightly so. Sarah Crossan presents the story of conjoined twins Tippi and Grace in freely flowing verse, so it doesn't really unfold but pops into the reader's face and heart directly from the twins' life.

Tippi and Grace ( named after Hitchcock film actresses) are sixteen and literally joined at the hip. They are ischiopagus tripus conjoined twins, two heads, upper torsos, four arms and one abdomen and two legs. The physiological phenomena to a certain degree resemble those of conjoined twins Abby and Britanny Hensel, in any way Crossan must have done tons of research and she did them thoroughly. Tippi and Grace present the everyday routines of conjoined life in sentences as broken as they seem in "normal" peoples' eyes and yet adding up to a whole existence. Of two people.
The twins have to go to school. They used to be homeschooled but money has run out. As young children, unusual and cute, they would have got donations, but as teenagers those have dried up, their father has lost his job, their younger sister has to have a job to pay for her ballett lessons, their mother works extra hours at the bank and if it wasn't for grandmother the family would totally fall apart. Conjoined twins are an expensive asset health insurances aren't too keen on.
Crossan doesn't spare her readers a single detail but doesn't string them up neatly on a story line but lets them fall from her hand or throws them or accidentally drops them. So we learn about how it goes at school, about the actual and also very unusual friends the twins make, Yasmeen and Jon, how they cook, how they shower, how they are sick, how they soldier on, how their family tries to function, how they live.
Tippi and Grace are one but two. They are two persons but forced into one body, one life, one fate.
They know all the time that if one should die, so would the other.
The story is told by Grace and while Tippi seems to be the twin who lives every moment to its fullest, it is Grace who will have a future, for this is a story about twin loss, too.

The health condition that eventually threatens this one life in two starts with Grace collapsing and later Tippi, too. It's Grace's heart that fails and since their metabolism is effectively one, Tippi's heart works for the two of them and consequently soon will fail, too. The only chance to save, maybe, both girls, but at least one, is surgical separation.
Conjoined twins are normally separated in infancy. Not only is a separation at age 16 difficult and dangerous, it also poses much more of a challenge on the identity of the girls. Not only their parents, THEY have to take the decision. Grace needs a heart transplant but isn't elligible for organ transplantation while conjoined, anyway, doing a heart operation on their conjoined body is an incalculable risk. It's separation or death for both girls.
Again Crossan spills the details in verse at us. Where does the additional skin come from when conjoined twins are separated? You'll learn, dear reader, you'll learn.

Grace tells the story, so the outcome is kind of predictable. "One" is a special book. About twin loss and about twin life. An encouraging book. An inspiring book. A book that if read by a twinless twin may invoke heartbreak and crumbling existence all over again, but then the book is already broken und crumbling with its short chapters in tumbling verses and broken lines, and they add up to a poetic entity, one life, two persons, one love.
Highly recommended.

Vanishing twins don't 'vanish'!

The term 'Vanishing Twin Syndrome' (VTS) has gained some popularity over the past ten years. According to Wikipedia it describes "...a fetus in a multi-gestation pregnancy which dies in utero and is then partially or completely reabsorbed. In some instances, the dead twin will be compressed into a flattened, parchment-like state known as fetus papyraceus.

Nice and clean, isn't it? The fetus dies and then is reabsorbed. Or if that doesn't happen, it will be compressed and flattened. Like flowers picked and pressed in a book. Lovely.

Only that's not what happens inside the womb. That's what happens in bits and bytes and on a keyboard.

At least wikipedia mentions that the fetus dies. It dies the same way every human dies. The heart stops beating, blood stops flowing, cells stop growing. Limbs stop moving, eyelids stop opening and closing, fingers stop flexing, toes stop wriggling, lips stop sucking. All these movements are common in a fetus between 8 and 12 weeks, the first three, of course, before. All these things also happen exactly the same way if it is not a vanishing twin but a vanishing singleton. A miscarriage. Because singletons also may vanish within the first trimesters without the mother noticing anything. It's called a "missed abortion" then and unlike in cases of VTS it's mostly treated by a curettage, an abrasion of the uterus. 

When there is a living twin fetus, nature is left to deal with the dead body so as not to risk the other baby. The idea of a corpse in the womb is, of course, unsettling and there are postings to be found in internet forums about pregnancy that warn of poisoning caused by a "rotting corpse" in the womb.
There is a slight risk for the mother and remaining child, but to rot in the full meaning a dead body needs oxygen which isn't present in the womb. 

So the dead twin doesn't rot, it mazerates.

We all know mazerating. We mostly don't know that we know it. Take a hot bath for a reeeally long time. Maybe with a good book and a glass of wine. After about 90 minutes - in my humble experience the necessary time for a good bath - your skin will be slightly swollen, look crumbled and maybe even flakes will come off. That is the uppermost layer of your epidermis, easily scrubbed off with a sponge or pumice.

That's mazerating. The very first step of it. If you stay even longer in the warm water (like John Lennon used to do), your skin will further deteriorate, and if you happen to be a dead fetus in the womb, your skin will finally drift off your body and float in the amniotic fluid.

Depending on the type of twin pregnancy the surviving fetus witnesses this process more or less directly. In a fraternal twin pregnancy the babies may be located within a distance in the womb. That doesn't mean they don't notice each other. Since they are both connected with the maternal organism, the MOTHER, through their umbilical cords and placentae, they, by proxy, witness what happens to the other. The death of one fetus causes a difference in the mother's metabolism. The placenta stops working, blood stops flowing. All these occurences are passed on, albeit diminished, to the surviving fetus. The difference is notable.

If the twins are monochorionic-diamniotic like many identical twins, or if they are dichorionic like some identical and all fraternals, but positioned very close to one another in the womb, they witness their co-twin's death in more detail.They notice the movement stopping, maybe notice that the heartbeat and blood flow stops - these things don't happen in complete silence - in addition to the effects on the mother's metabolism.All in all, for all these twins something changes from normal - movement, sensations, noises made by the co-twin - to absolutely unnormal. 

The most severe effects are felt by the fetus in a monochorionic-monoamniotic pregnancy. This, rare, type of twin-pregnancy is also the most risky. There is still an estimated 50% risk of one or both babies dying before birth in a, so called, MoMo-pregnancy. With two umbilical cords floating in the amnion, entangling, twisting around limbs, the possibility of one or both of them knotting or wraping round one of the babies is always present. Cord accidents are a much feared cause of fetal demise (medicine lingo for a baby dying before birth) in singleton pregnancies, too, in a MoMo-pregnancy they're almost to be expected.

Being with another one in the same amniotic sac is the closest a human being can get to another one. The twins feel each other earlier than other types of twins. Through all the weeks when their bodies develop and their brains accordingly - for every sensation felt, every movement made fires some input into the developing brain and causes new synapses to be built - there is not a single moment when this is not their one and only and the only normal way to exist: in contact with one another. Impuls followed by re-action. I kick you, you kick me. It all belongs together. In a MoMo-pregnancy being in close contact with another one, feeling another one's movements, presence, limbs and skin is the only way of existing the growing fetus is exposed to. This is its normal. This is the only way of existence its brain acknowledges as normal. This is it.

There is, of course, no way to interview a fetus in utero about its experiences, but it is a well known phenomenon among mothers that very young children - and not so young ones, too - have difficulty do distinguish between themselves and what they feel. To realise that me feeling, a thing felt and the feeling itself are three different things is a highly advanced stage of human development. Thus a young child will just cry when it hurts somewhere and not be able to point to his head or tummy for approximately two or three years after birth. It's very likely that a fetus in utero if it experiences anything at all - and we know it does, we have, fortunately, sound scientific proof of that (google Alessandra Piontelli!) - resembles the young child rather than the grown person. What the baby feels it is. The twin baby in close contact with the co-twin IS the two of them. 

When a fetus in a MoMo-pregnancy dies, the surviving twin witnesses directly what happens to the co-twin. Unfortunately, as stated in the title of this entry, the co-twin does not vanish, it mazerates. Its skin comes off in flakes, they touch the co-twin's skin, its lips, it may even swallow them by accident. 

After the skin came off, the organs will fill with liquid, swell and then dissolve. Some of them may get caught in the co-twin's moving limbs. Sounds like a zombie-film? What may it feel like to the baby?!

The skeleton is last to disintegrate. If the pregnancy was advanced into the second or even third trimester, the skeleton may be too hard, already, to completely dissolve and the bones, maybe also some tissue, will form something like a lump in the womb. It will sink to the bottom of the amniotic sac but depending on the mother's movements may also drift up again and touch the surviving twin fetus. 

Not nice. Not clean and easy and certainly not as harmless as "vanishing" indicates. 

Such remains of a "vanished" twin may be found at birth but up to the 1980s doctors and midwives most certainly wouldn't mention it to the mother. They may have expressed the need to to an additional curettage to "clear out the womb" without going into further detail. Nobody will know there ever was a twin.

Nobody but the survivor.

To be in close contact with these weird things emerging from the sudden unnormality certainly overwhelmes the fetus in its abilities to compensate. These moving things create an unexpected and unpleasant sensation in its body. What is this slimy thing clinging to my feet? Why AM I a slimy thing clinging to my feet? What is wrong? Why AM I wrong?

Neurologists track the perception of one's own body back to the time in the womb. Whether a person feels okay with his/her own body is largely due to how they are treated as babies and toddlers by their parents but part of it may origin from experiences in the womb. For when the brain forms, it takes what is given to it as input and info from its environment in utero. The death and mazeration of a co-twin is a totally different experience than a corpse-free pregnancy. It would be highly surprising if these experiences were NOT stored in those parts of the fetal brain which are very active even before birth. Especially the amygdala, the part of the brain that deals with feelings and fears, has been noted to be even more active before birth than after. 

It should be clear from this scenario that a vanishing twin pregnancy MAY result in a severely traumatised newborn infant. 

It is not a necessary outcome. The capacity of the individual to deal with trauma is different even in a fetus. Chance may favour one child more than the other and provide less traumatic experience. Beside the type of pregnacy the emotional situation of the mother, her diet, even the family history, the political situation the family lives in - war or peace - all this may contribute to the way a fetus copes with the death of a co-twin. 

But one thing should be kept in mind by all who have to deal with the possibility or certainty of a person, be it themselves, parents, relatives or friends, subject to VTS -whatwever a vanishing twin does, it doesn't just vanish.

For those who want to check the information given in this entry - I learned the details of what happens when a fetus mazerates from several handbooks for midwives and medical articles on the internet. There are pictures, too. They aren't pretty.

For the development of a fetus in utero and its capacity to experience and react we will be forever indepted to Alessandra Piontelli who did the first long-term ultrasound study in the 1990s. She covered the development of several children, twins among them, from the 8th week of the pregnancy to four years of age. Her books are amazing.

For some pictures of miscarried children to illustrate how these tiny individuals living through this apocalypse may look, go to https://lostinnocentsblog.wordpress.com/photographs/. A very informative site done with love and care unsurpassable.

For the description of how it MAY feel to be in close proximity of a dead co-twin the work of Luc Nicon, French psychotherapist, is of immense value. Early loss surviving twins might benefit greatly from a look at one of his books.

We survived the zombie-apocalypse. And live to tell the tale. 

And don't forget. Before it became a "zombie", it was our twin. Before that upside down we were thrown into there was our normal, our natural exchange with our twins in utero, our feeling each other, our being together, our being t(w)ogether.- 

Our brains and bodies stored that, too. 

Twin mementos

It's difficult to find a memento for someone who never had a name nor a face. Still, I assembled a collection of them over the years and here are some of them:

 This is a silver pendant showing two dolphins. I chose it - and engraved it myself with names for me and my twin - because they jump in different directions and are still connected.

 This is another silver pendant of two little angels kissing.

                                               
 This one is special. It's an ammonite fossil I found at Mainz Christmas Market two years ago. What makes it special is there are two of them. Ammonites are prehistoric marine animals whose shells are often found as fossils. They resemble a very young embryo in the womb. The booth trading in minerals at the Christmas Market had many petrified ammonites that day but only one that had two in one.

 Sometimes, when the unfairness of being a twinless twin hits me hard I take to this pendant. It's a pewter one showing twin skeletons in a fetal position twins often take in the womb, when one twin faces downward and the other upward. It may look a bit morbid but I still wear it sometimes. It's a reminder that not only life before birth is real but so is death. On the old ultrasound it may look as if a twin vanishes, like a soap bubble in the air. In reality the twin DIES and there will be a skeleton however tiny.

 This one is more comforting. It's made from Tibetian yak bone and shows the sun and the moon kissing. I choose it when I feel my twin may, after all, have been a brother, because there is more of a male and female completing one another quality in it.

You can order customised dogtags all over the internet and I have a huge collection of the ordinary US-Army type, but this one is made in the fashion of the German Bundeswehr. I assumed my twin was a girl when I ordered it and it's engraved with the names I chose for me and my (girl)twin and the words "Once a twin - always a twin". It's a bit large to wear it so I have it stored in my treasure shrine.

Here's another find from Mainz Christmas Market. These adorable little bears hugging I embossed with the letters A and B which may just indicate twin A and twin B or the names I chose. The little pendant hanging from them I orderer from a Dutch website where you can find all kinds of things made to order with your own photos. I used the water colour I made at age 4 of two identical girls rope skipping I described before on this blog.

Here is one of my dogtags US-Army style I ordered with the words "Once a twin - always a twin". The other "dogtag" I made from fimo and it bears the words "Surviving twin". I wear it when I'm in the mood to encourage myself. I made it to this life for a reason! One day I will know which one.

Last but not least the most fitting memento for my twin I ever found. It's a bone carving showing two dolphins positioned like embryos in the womb. Sometimes I wonder why I ever take it off.

What if...

...my twin had lived?
Sometimes I try to imagine what life with my twin might have been like.
Then I look at the picture I have posted before (a watercolour I did at age 4) and think of my sister (left) always a bit more outgoing, more adventurous than me.

Would our younger siblings have been born at all? I think so. Our mother conceived so easily our father once said he only had to look at her lovingly and she became pregnant.
But our parents may not have had a divorce. They may have had too much to do with four of us to become hippies and turn our family into a great aquarian experiment. We may have gone to a regular primary school, not the Montessori one I suffered at for four years. We still would have had much the same way to school, though, and we would have argued about which dog we wanted to have.

I would have wanted a Dachshound.
- And I a Whippet.
- Oh, yes, but I also wanted a Saluki.
- Then I would have wanted an Afghan.

Not so much different from how it was.

Our parents would not have sent us to separate classes at school. Too much trouble with parents evenings and all that stuff, but through puberty we would have drifted apart a bit. I would have had riding lessons (I really did) and always be a bit afraid of the horses (I was). You would have done some other sports - maybe handball or gymnastics - but you would have come with me to the stables once or twice and be less afraid of the horses than I. That would have been mean.
I would have been totally into animals and you would have been more popular, but I wouldn't have been lonely because I'd always have had you.

We would have graduated from school together and suddenly discovered we wanted to be together again and go to the same university. Would I still have studied theology? I think I may but probably not Catholic since becoming Catholic was part of my searching for you everywhere without knowing. Our parents may have stayed with the Protestant Church, we would have gone to Confirmation and I may have studied to become a pastor. You would have cancelled your studies - maybe geography - after two years and become a flight attendant. Yes,you would! Always with both feet in the air while I am trying to have one foot on earth and one in heaven.

Would I be married to the same husband? Probably not, but maybe to someone very similar in character. A fellow theologian, perhaps. We would have shared a comgregation.

You would have flown around the world and come to visit us often. You wouldn't have married but you would have felt like my children were yours, too, and you'd have been godmother to all of them (three at least, maybe four like I have now, or even five). They would have adored you.

Your favourite country would have been...

-South-Africa!
-Why South-Africa?
-No idea, it just may have been.

Okay, South-Africa. You would have sent us pictures from Krüger Nationalpark and always dream of finding a South-African husband. I would have been jealous of all your boyfriends.

I would have been worried your plane might crash all the time...

Now, at age 50+, you would have thought about retirement with work conditions at Lufthansa becoming tougher every year. I would have wanted you to settle down near me but been afraid to say so for fear to drive you away. Because, of course, you would have been talking about moving to...

-South-Africa.
-Yeah! I got that. South-Africa.

I would feel a bit abandoned by you, now, because you'd mostly be away and life would be getting more exhausting (it really is) and I would think we should be more together and help one another.

Not so much different from how it is.

We would have talked on WhatsApp daily, sometimes by the hour. You would have said "WhatsApp is really almost like being in the womb together again. We don't talk novels but we're always in touch."

Not so much different from how it is...

Twin-Life before Birth

Lately I have felt the effects of being an early twin-loss survivor more keenly again. I will try to restart this blog and see who picks up or to whom it resonates anew.



When people realise they very probably were conceived a twin there are some things nearly all of us do. We give our twins names and we invent a life together. We imagine what it was like in the womb, how we played together, what we felt and thought and what our life together might have been, and we treat ourselves and our twins as PERSONS. There is no other way. As conscious individuals we cannot speak of other individuals than as persons.
If we, born and grown to think ands feel als persons, want to remember our twins we have to invent their personalities.
I did and I do the same.
Yet, all the time I am very conscious of a flaw in this scenario seemingly healing my twinloss if only in imagination. My twin was not a person when s/he died and neither was I.

That's not a bad thing. I still was I. There is a continuity from the fertilised egg in my mother's womb to the 54-year-old typing these words. But to be a person includes the ability to distinguish between me and another person. We did not do that in the womb.

My twin and I just were. We were there. We had our own blood circuit, our own hearts. We grew differently ( I have reason to believe my twin was much smaller than me), we moved differently. We were not one, we were separate entities, but us being together was the only reality we knew. To be was to be together. I moved, my twin moved. We reached out, we kicked, our movements sent ripples through the amniotic fluid. Impulses received from the other one, responses to impulses sent - all this was what I experienced as presence, as existence. So did my twin. The other's presence was part of our individual presence, part of our individual existence.

So, when my twin was lost I did not lose a person, I lost a presence. And I lost part of my existence.
What had been a daily, normal and substantial part of existence, what had been a decisive part of my very exyistence, the PRESENCE of my twin, was suddenly lost.
And is lost to this very day.
My twin was not taken from my side, s/he was taken from my core.

At the same time psychologists in one country still doubt that prenatal twin-loss can have any effect on the survivor at all, in other countries statistics show that such a loss is experienced the more devastating the earlier it occurs. (http://www.primal-page.com/twiner.htm)
And how could it not be?
There are no words to express the panic when the loss happens. There is no name to cherish and no pictures to keep. There are just feelings, very profound feelings of mortal danger, existential fear, the dire need to curl away from the source of danger... All this is stacked away neatly in my amygdala and gets fired at me in odd situations.
When a WhatsApp message I sent does not receive a reply a chasm opens beneath me.
When my keys are not where they ought to be panic engulfes me.
And sometimes, for no apparent reason, a convulsive pain grips me, as if something was ripped from my midriff.
It's the lack of a presence that should be there to confirm my existence.
When I reach out to that presence and it isn't there, my body flies into panic mode.
The amygdala is a stubborn conservative. Nothing can convince this small gland in my brain responsible for storing emotions, preferrably negative ones, that what happens now isn't connected with what happened then.
To my amygdala I'm a wholesome entity. No difference between embryo-me and university-graduate-me.
And both, the embryo-me and the university-graduate-me, are twin-me.

These things are getting worse the older I get. The pain is getting more piercing. The despair is holding as firmer grip.
The inability to consciously comprehend and articulate what happened then and what is happening now gets more frustrating.
At times I feel like a veteran from a war with a shrapnell shard still embedded in my body somewhere (When I was I child there were many men suffering from that). It can't be operated upon, maybe it won't kill me but it's a constant reminder of a wound I received before I was born.