The chasm inside or Don’t feed the beast! – how Early Loss Twins face an inward predator

 Memories can be a raging beast inside. They creep up on us, pounce and strike when we are unaware. They take a smell, a sound, a flash back and tear at our souls with their claws. Twinless Twins can tell tales of encountering the beast when somebody calls them by their twin’s name or when they come back to a place they visited together.

But not having memories is a killer beast.

We don’t notice it at first. As Early Loss Twins we revel in creating memories about our twins who were lost so young no pictures of them could ever be taken. Sometimes there are a few of two babies together or a blurry ultrasound, but especially for those of us who were born in the 1970s or earlier, or whose mothers weren’t expecting twins, there is nothing. Simply, devastatingly nothing.

If the twin was lost in utero or stillborn, most countries will not even provide a birth certificate, let alone a grave. Some of us go to great lengths to find the place their twins were buried, some even succeed in putting up a marker, a small stone or a plaque, but never without much inquiry, struggle and some money. It takes a lot of effort to embark on this journey and sometimes it leads to a, literally, dead end. The early lost twin is extinct to all but the survivor. Like he or she never existed.

This is not bearable. We feel our twins in every cell of our bodies. We grew with them alongside and their existence is part of our every fibre. We KNOW them. We can feel them. Their existence is part of our existence.

But then there are all those other – our parents, who never held them, counselors who, well-meaningly, say: don’t burden yourself with the past!, doctors who from their high seat of scientific lore say: it’s doubtful such an early loss would ever affect you. And it all sums up to the verdict: you’re just making this up! Your twin possibly never existed, was too small to ever be felt by you, their death never affected you. 

I’ve had all those things said to me and I stood alone. Most of us stand alone. Nobody comes to our defense, because nobody was there, when we were together, and nobody witnessed our loss.

So we start to build memories. We create pictures. We collect symbols. We write letters, give our twins names they never were given by their parents, give them the live they – crimson well – should have had. The loss we suffered so very early, when we still in the making, makes a bottomless chasm inside us. We were built around that chasm, it’s at the very centre of our being, of our souls.
We try to fill it. With pictures, symbols and words. But the beast inside us is hungry, it demands more. It’s not just a chasm, it’s an ancient deity demanding offerings. And the more we bring, the more it craves. 

We hope for the one image, the one symbol that will sum it up for us and bring closure. We think if we only find one thing – a picture, a birth certificate, a quote by a relative who remembers our mothers talking about her expected twins – we may find peace, the beast will be satisfied, the chasm filled. We hope and work and strife and testify and cry, and it’s never enough. Each time we make a testimony for our twins, speak their names, acknowledge their brief existence to the uncaring world, paint for them, choose a song for them, shout out for them, there’s a short repriese, a fleeting sense of peace…
… and then the beast roars up again “BUT MAYBE IT’S ALL IN YOUR IMAGINATION”, and we scramble for another token of proof and assuagement, and it’s never enough.

When we meet Late Loss Twins, it can become even worse. We unconsciously try to compete with them or to at least keep up. We feel the need to prove our twinship, yes, we do! We want to hear their confirmation: you’re one of us. We pull our feelings, our grief, our love, they connect us to those “real” twins. We try to become more like them, copy their sentiments, model our twinship according to theirs. Yes, we do.
It’s not wrong to do so, it’s normal. But it’s neither necessary nor will it satisfy the beast.

The only thing that really scares the beast inside is hard facts. They are like stones we can throw in its face, but they don’t always feel pleasant to the touch.

Here are some: I do NOT have conscious memories of my twin. We did NOT have discussions in the womb and called each other nicknames.
I do NOT love my twin as a person, we never were persons together.
I do NOT have memories, pictures or keepsakes of my twin.
I do NOT grieve my twin like I would a person I met outside the womb.
I do NOT miss my twin in the sense that I miss seeing their faces or hearing their voices.

I DO have unconscious memories of my twin which run deeper than any conscious ones ever can, and because they are the only ones I have, they are much more powerful than conscious memories. They are part of my very existence.

I DO love my twin in a sense too intimate the much worn out word “love” can’t even begin to cover it. If “love” in the common sense means the need to feel a person close by, my love for my twin is the need to feel that person inside myself, within the boundaries life outside the womb normally sets to humans. My twin is not only closer to me than any other human being, he/she is part of me. Literally.

I DO have keepsakes of my twin, but they are not always things I would want to put on display. Sudden inexplicable panic reactions when I catch my sleeve may send me back to the moment my twin died and the sudden dip in blood pressure tugged at my umbilical cord. Or an upsurging need to feel a physical presence combines with a feeling of resentment to actual touch – that’s my twin’s legacy of being so close and then being gone. Or the equally sudden feeling of a presence, an unexpected warmth (not the menopause kind!), a wave of feeling connected to someone, and when I look up nobody is there – these are the keepsakes. Immaterial but not unreal, but never to be put on shelves for the world to see.

I DO grieve my twin with all my heart and soul and body, but not in the ways of other twins who are reminded of their loss in that piercing way of waking up in the morning and only after a split second remembering it. My loss is that bottomless chasm in everything. My twin’s loss doesn’t show up in activities no longer shared, places no longer went to, understanding no longer experienced, phone calls no longer made, glances no longer exchanged. Rather it tinges everything. My crying for my twin is not done in waves building up inside, but like the constant lapping of a lake’s seemingly still waters, eating away the safety of a shore…

I DO miss my twin in the sense that I will never feel complete on my own. Actually, I never knew what it feels like to feel complete. I miss my twin not like an arm or a leg, but like a part of my very existence.

These hard facts can, if they won’t satisfy the beast, put it on leash. Present it with the truth! I will NEVER have what other twins had (actually, I envy them the time spent with their twins in life outside the womb, but at least one thing I do not envy them: the heartsplitting moment when they learned of their twin’s death). I will never be like them, but that doesn’t make me any less a twin.

To be an Early Loss Twin is a way of being a twin just as legitimate as being identical or fraternal or conjoined. All these present twinship differently. Early loss, being an in-utero twin, is just a different experience, not a deficient one.

To stop feeding the beast is an important step of healing. Because as long as we try to fill its gaping maw, we let it control our thoughts and feelings about our twins. Because it will always command us “you’re not doing enough! You’re not grieving enough! You’re not loving enough! You’re not enough of a TWIN!” and we will cater to its craving instead of cater to our twinship.

I promise you, fellow Early Loss Twins, once you stop trying to fill this chasm inside, to feed this beast, your twinship will NOT go away and diminish. It will become stronger in what it really is: a precious, a wonderful, a unique way of twinship.
Remember: you can’t lose what is part of your very being. Once conceived a twin, being a twin when your first cells split and your every synapses were formed, you’re always, always a twin, until your cells disintegrate and our souls will be back together.

P.S. And yes, I wouldn’t have believed this, either, ten years ago. But, please, give it a thought.

The Rocky Horror Wombtwin Show - my twin may have been deformed. So what!

Something every early and especially in utero loss twin wrestles with is the big WHY. Why did my twin die? Apart from the fact we may in most cases never know the real cause, we know a multitude of possible causes, and it's not an easy or even welcome task to face them.

We tend to imagine our twins whole, healthy and alive. We depict our life together within the parameters we take from living twins. We try to paint their picture along those lines. Were we identical? How would opur personalities have differed? What pranks would we have played? What would we have called each other?

Rarely the idea that our twins might have been handicapped enters our minds, but in fact this is one of the most probable causes for in utero fetal demise: a severe handicap, genetic or other, that renders the fetus non-viable.

Let me face it for a moment: My twin might have been handicapped, grossly disfigured, anencephalic, ancephalic, missing limbs, having a misshapen face or body or both, unable to move because of spina bifida, blind, deaf or retarded.

I was personally forced to face this possibility through a dream I recently had. I have learned, and my own experience supports this, that dreams about water recur to in utero life. In this particular dream I was sitting beside an indoor pool with my twin. We were both naked and talking animatedly. I could see my twin's body, but I could not see her head. My twin told me she had received an answer to an application she had handed in and that she had been accepted. I was so happy for her. Then I said "Let's got to the other side" and glided into the water. I had trouble keeping my head up and the other side of the pool, unfortunately, lay in a murky twilight. When I reached there, I realized my twin hadn't followed me and I was on my own.

So far it's a "normal" early loss dream. The recurring topics of being alone, having to pass through a narrow passage or being in the water are familiar to me. The missing head was new.

I have had dreams before in which I think my twin featured personally, but I can't remember if I ever noticed her not having a head. In this dream it was prominent.
And that lead me to facing the idea that my twin was ancephalic ort anencephalic. Missing a head or missing parts of the brain.

Anencephaly is much more common than ancephaly. The latter mostly occurs in conjoined twins when one stops developing resulting in the birth of a baby with additional limbs or a non-viable twin attached as a so called "parasitic twin". Babies born with part of the brain missing (anencephaly) or parts of the skull (Acrania) happen in singleton births. If detected early most of them are aborted, but there are moving and inspiring stories about mothers who chose to meet their babies whom some would likely call "monsters". Some their parents were told would not survive pregnancy, delivery or their first day lived for days, weeks or in case of a boy born with a condition called Acalvaria even years (https://dcoonline.networkforgood.com//).

Anyway, this is not the way I picture my twin sister.
Still this might have been the way she looked or would have looked had she survived.

Something each and every story I have read about those mothers and fathers who chose to meet their deformed children conveyed was: they are human. They are persons. They have a personality. They are worthy of life and worthy of love.
I know this, of course. The vague physical memories I have of being in the womb with my twin are skin touching, hands and feet meeting and intwining, acting and reacting. Mental or physical capability didn't matter much in the womb. We were together and this togetherness laid the foundation of how I, the survivor, perceive myself and my environment. How my twin would have looked plays no part in this. The fact that she was there, does.

Many "wombtwin suvivors" I met online try to imagine their twin as near to perfection as possible. They invent their lives together, they fantasize about nicknames they gave each other and their personalities in the womb. Some even cross over into the esoteric field and create dialogues with their twins before conception and how they planned their short stay in this world. If this gives comfort to people, I'm all for it. Personally I prefer to stick with medical reality, it's no less miraculous imhO. Yes, my twin may have been deformed, disfigured, her body not able to develop past a certain stage, she's still my twin. She's still the foundation of who I am.
And as far as souls are concerned, we know that these far exceed the possibilities of a limited body. Remember Stephen Hawking?
My twin's soul was - is- beautiful. More beautiful than mine, maybe, which has been disfigured by the trauma of prenatal loss. We will make a wonderful pair in heaven!

Ask the Ring!

When Gandalf the Grey tried to find out if the ring Bilbo the Hobbit won from Gollum was The One Ring, he thought of asking Saruman the White, who was mighty in ringlore, went to Minas Tirith to study the old scriptures written down by Isildur and went to great trouble to find Gollum himself, who had had the ring longer than anyone else. He also talked to Bilbo and Frodo who consequently were involved in a splendid and rather frightening adventure told at length in the masterpiece The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

You see, I have read the book. Long before there ever was DREAM of a movie.
Und
But in the end Gandalf got his proof from the only source utterly reliable - the ring itself.
Put into the small hearthfire at Bag End on a sunny April afternoon the ring itself showed the fiery letters which revealed it to be The One Ring.

My twinship is very similar to the One Ring, made by Sauron, the original He-who-must-not-be-named. One Ring to rule all my waking moment, One Ring to find me everywhere, One Ring to bring everything I feel and do and say back to the topic of twinship and bind me in the darkness of losing my twin. In the land of twinloss where the shadows lie.m

And like Gandalf I went to and fro asking people I thought would know if they knew my feeling that I was a twin was true. Is this the One Ring that rules and finds and brings and binds me? Twinloss? Is it real? Is it true? Who was my Twin? Brother or sister? Who am I?
I studied the twinlore masters. Books and articles. Doctors and psychologists. Charles Bocklage, Alessandra Piontelli, Caryl Denis, Nancy Segal, Althea Hayton, Joan Woodward...
I dug into scriptures, on paper and in bits and bites, and I hunted down many a Gollum to crystalgaze for me. Am I a twin? Did I have a sister or a brother? When did they die?
I talked to those who had lived with me for decades, my mother, my aunt, my father - what did they remember from my childhood? Did I ever talk about having a twin?

In the end, like Gandalf, I despaired. And then, like Gandalf, I thought of something which might tell me the truth. Who was present when my twin (possibly) lived and died? Just one person. I myself.
My body was there, in the womb,when the One Ring that was to bind me, was forged: the loss of my twin. And my body tells the story when I take the time to listen to it, put t back into the fire of remembrance. Parts of my brain who are shoved aside by my thoughts and actions since I started to think consciously, have carefully stored EVERYTHING that happened, and they'll tell the tale, if I'm ready to listen.

Why do I panic when I get caught somewhere? My sleeve on a door know, my fingers when hanging up the washing? Why does my amygdala (not a Star Wars princess but a very ancient part of my brain) fire a Red Alert ever time that happens?
Why do I shrink away from touch? Why did I recoil from being touched as a toddler? Is the High Functioning Autism that runs in my paternal family (and which was not confirmed by a specialist) the only reason for that behaviour? Why did I scream, and flail my arms when I touched some mud or algae floating in the water on the lakeside as a kid?
Why do I fall apart when something goes missing? A pen, my keys, my cellphone?
Why do I always reach out inwardly to something, someone without ever being able to even describe what or who it is I am seeking?
Why do I always want to follow someone and never succeed in doing it in reality? Why do I complain of being alone and of being haunted by people at the same time?

I might just be off my rocker, of course.
On the other hand, I have always been able to run my family, cope with reality, take over responsibility, act responsibly. I'm not instable, depressed or psychotic. No therapist has ever been able to put a tag on me. I don't fit into their agendas.
I don't fit into any agenda, not even my own.
If you have tried every other explanation but one, the one left might be the one which fits.

The ring I am wearing is the One Ring, the ring of twinloss.
My body remembers being caught in my twin's umbilical cord, when she sank down to the bottom of the womb after her heart stopped...
My body remembers touching her mazerating body, her skin coming off in flakes, her intestines disolving...
My brain remembers getting no response like I used to when reaching out to her...
My body and brain, my whole existence remembers being two, being t(w)ogether, being connected to someone. Not anyone, not just someone, not a friend, a spouse, an idol, a leader, a what-ever, but my twin, and no-one can fill that space. I want, I NEED to follow someone, but not anyone.

When I stop trying to reconstruct my twinship by giving my twin a name, a face, a symbol of memory, when I stop trying to handle the whole subject of early twinloss with my frontal cortex and listen to the older parts of my brain, as old as the One Ring forged by the smiths of Eregion in the beginning of all time, my time, my body, my being the Ring itself, tells if is it the One.

My twin is not my soulmate!

I lost a twin before birth and I miss him/her.
Recently this sentence got less of the "but-how-can-you-miss-someone-you-never-knew" responses and more of the "I-understand-we-all-want-a-soulmate" kind.
I understand, too.
I have had many soulmates over the years. Imaginary ones. Book or movie characters. Saints or Guardian Angels. They always understand me, they are always there for me, they always give and they never ask for anything. They are perfect.
I have heard people talk about having real soulmates in friends, siblings, partners, and I don't doubt their testimonies. Funnily enough, though, I very, VERY rarely have heard someone say "I AM a soulmate to someone."
Many twinless twins I know online refer to their deceased twins as their soulmates. Many early loss twins even describe their twins that way.
I don't.

My twin was...
That's the most important thing about to say about my twin. He/She at one time existed. And that time was the most formative period in my life. It was when my software was created, my operating system. The presence of my twin is still a crucial part of me, all of me.
But HOW my twin would have been as a person, how our relationship would have developed had be been born alive together is open to imagination and speculation.
We might have been highly competitive.
We might have rivalled for our parents' attention.
We might have felt overwhelmed by our funamental closeness.
We might have had long spells of not speaking.
We might have felt discouraged by one another, by the other one's actual or imagined excellency.

It doesn't matter. My twin's presence would still be essential to my existence.

My twin might have been severly handicapped, mentally or physical.
My twin might have been non-verbal.

I might have been severly handicapped, mentally or physically.

Or we might have had a happy childhood, doing everything together and being each other's best friend...

...and then fall out with each other at puberty.

Or not. We might have gone on to be inseparable, talk to each other each day, share everything from bills to boyfriends...

...and then be separated by cancer or a car crash in our mid.thirties.

It doens't matter. My twin's presence would still be the core influence on me from conception on.

My twin might have been my soulmate or my archrival, my angel or my nemesis, his/her very existence is what matters. The constant absence of his/her presence is what makes my life lopsided in so many ways.  The constant presence of his/her absence is like a bottomless hole I stumble in again and again and spend too much time and too much energy to scramble out again.

Of course I have tried to imagine my twin. To invent a name and a face and the relationship we might have had. That's normal for early loss twins.
But none of these HOWs have had only a fraction of the influence my twin's PRESENCE has had on my life. My twin's ABSENT presence.

I'm not looking for a soulmate. I think it would be exhausting to be so close to another human all the time. If a soulmate would understand everything about me, I'd have to understand everything about my soulmate. What a consuming task that would be!

I am looking for my twin's presence. For that gaping hole in my soul I try to circle, try to cover up, try to ignore, try to explain away, try to celebrate, try to not get sucked into, try to dive into...

It's not about being happy, being understood, having a best friend...
...it's just about being present.

My twin was.
My twin was lost.
My twin's loss is present.
My twin's presence is lost.
My twin's presence is.

The rest is silence.

Memories... like hidden data

As an in-utero-twinless twin I don't have the "usual" memories of my twin. I don't remember her face, her laugh, what we did as kids, our birthday parties, pranks we played on people and so on.
My conscious mind, the part of my brain that holds pictures, sounds and events, goes blank when I type in "twin".
Other parts of my brain don't. They do remember, but it's not so easy to find them. They're burried under the conscious stuff like a hidden program in my computer running in the background all the time and taking up much MUCH working space, but visible only if you know which keys to press.
Most data there is about the loss, about panic and fear, abandonement, negative feelings. It pops up first, but when I dig deeper and try to reconstruct older files, I find more.
I find a memory of entangled limbs. Of feet and legs touching and floating apart. I find a lot of floating and touching, actually.
It runs in the back of my mind, where consciousness never goes, because it's to primarily and messy for the educated mind (hrrm!). It pops up and vanishes again, it can't be printed or converted into a JPG-file...
BUT IT IS THERE! IT IS REAL! IT'S MY TWIN!

When there is no proof...

I have no medical proof of my twinship.
There is one person who keeps coming back to question me. Are you sure you're not making this up? To have a handy explanation for being different? To make up for your lack of social interaction? To seek attention? To produce the feeling that you're special, somehow?
I am that person. Everytime I post in the Facebook group for twinless twins or upload a posting here on this blog, part of me feels like a fraud. I am making it up. Maybe I'm not a twin at all.

True, there are all the problems my mother had during pregnancy. There is my aunt saying "It's two in there" because the commotion inside was visible from outside. There is the fact my mother was hospitalised and when she left the hospital her cervix was partially open. There was the midwife saying the placenta was so huge "it could have held two".

And there is me with all the symptoms all the questionnaires ever done on prenatal twinloss can come up with. There are weird physical sensations, dreams, PTSD which can't be traced to any event in post-natal life and a water colour drawing I did ate age 4, long before I had even heard of twinloss before birth. Long before anyone in my neck of the wood had heard of it.

But still - there is no proof.

I talked to my mother, but it's so long ago she mixes up dates (and pregnancies, I have two younger siblings living). I talked to psychics, but if I'm not a fraud, they certainly were, the ones I met. They didn't even get the facts right I could easily check.

The only proof I will ever have is the same a person has who is faced with two boxes. Two identical boxes, wooden or cardboard. They are sealed, they look the same and the person is alone with them in the desert. Nobody near to ask or bear testimony.

When I pick the boxes up, one after the other, one of them is clearly heavier than the other. There is something inside.
I can feel the weight. I have no scales near to prove the difference in weight. Other people can't lift the boxes, they are meant for me alone, they are MY life. Only I can feel the difference in weight.
When I put them back on the ground again they look exactly the same.
I shift their positions, I try to distract myself. They look alike. There can't possibly any difference between them.
I pick them up again.
One is still heavier than the other.
They still look alike.
There is still no outward sign I can show to others to prove the boxes are different.
Only I can feel it, I am aware of the difference. One is filled, the other is empty.
That's all the proof I'll ever get.

Nobody is old in Heaven!

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.