Books about Twinloss No 6 "The Survivor" by Lynne Schulz

This book is lying next to my computer, because I like to read in it while our old "snail-top" uploads something and because I frequently recommend it to others on the net. It' small, it didn't cost much and it's priceless.
Lynne Schulz from Australia lost her daughter Megan in utero and wrote a preceding book about this experience, called "The Diary". This second book is dedicated to Megan's brother Rhys, the survivor of the twin pregnancy. Schulz manages to keep the balance between telling personal experience, giving others the opportunity to voice theirs and draw some theoretical and many practical conclusions from these. Scientist may call anecdotical what is told in this book. It's the stories of parents who have lost a twin or multiple during pregnancy, at birth or shortly after, of twins or multiples who survived and live with the knowledge to be closely connected to someone they never saw, and it's also about the reactions of teachers at kindergarden or school, often sceptic of the relevance of these experiences. Schulz knows she is something of a pioneer in this field and she's not afraid to do the work. The last chapter of the book deals with her efforts to establish a support service for women suffering a stillbirth, especially in a multiple pregnancy, in Australia.
"The Survivor" gathers testimonies of several families concerning the actual loss of their children, the reactions of the survivors, the way the parents dealt with the loss (with a special chapter for the father's way to do that. Normally it's expertly overlooked in studies that fathers grieve differently from mothers) and how they communicate the loss to their growing children. It also features a chapter about twinloss in different cultures and the status of research in 2003, quoting -among others - Woodward, Haddon, Pector and Piontelli who more or less laid the foundation of the subject in the 1990s.
Who lacks the time to read the whole of Alessandra Piontelli's or Joan Woodward's studies or just looks for a brief introduction to the phenomenon of surviving twin-children should by all means get hold of this book. Who for any other reason is interested in the topic should, too.

Notification from the subconscious. We've got mail!

There are two people who "know" what happened to my twin. One is my mother in whose belly it all happened and the other is me who was there when it happened. My mother couldn't see and I can't tell, so our means of finding out more about my pre-natal trauma are very limited. So far, dreams have served as a useful tool to do so.
My mother recently told me a dream she had back in 1992. Neither she nor I had ever heard of early twin loss, then. She wrote this dream in her diary at that time so o need to rely on - faulty -memory :-).
She said she was holding a male fetus in her hand. His mother had walked away and she was fretting how to put it back into the womb in time for his birth. It troubled her that she didn't know the expected date of delivery. The fetus looked about three months old, with his head much larger than his body but his sex was clearly visible.
My mother didn't think much about the dream at that time, but she did write it down so we could find it almost ten years later.