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.

Books on twinloss N° 15 "Three Black Swans" by Caroline B. Cooney

I hesitated to purchase this book from amazon-marketplace because the reviews were mostly critical.
Characters not believably described, exaggerated story line, abrupt shift of perspective - the mostly juvenile readers didn't seem to buy into this story. I still bought it and I do not regret it.

Most of the reviews seem to think the book starts with a hoax 16yo old Missy plays on her friends and schoolmates pretending she found her long lost identical twin in her cousin Claire.
It doesn't. It starts with Missy listening to the radio and hearing something about twins who are much different in size and weight at birth might catch up in later life. It triggers something in her perception of herself and her cousin Claire with whom she has a very close relationship. When her adventurously minded biology teacher, goaded to talk about hoaxes in class by the students, sets them the task to create a hoax themselves, Missy really uses the opportunity to spill the beans on a family secret she hardly knows exists.

Cooney's style poses a challenge to her young readers. It seems to be abrupt, chaotic in parts, changing perspective too fast, dropping info and then leaving the scene, but as an adult reader I think she just keeps closer to reality than to the traditional idea of a story line. In reality stories seldom have lines but knotted wads and the author in this book doesn't do the steady unraveling the reader expects, but just throws them the wad to do the unraveling themselves.

There is Missy getting a senior student in charge of the school tv to distribute her alleged meeting with her alleged twin to the whole school and - unplanned by her but totally in line with modern kids' thinking - via YouTube to the rest of the world.
There is Claire, her cousin - as the girls have believed all their lives - having "a strong family resemblance", unwilling to participate in the 'hoax' but playing along after all and becoming unexpectedly overwhelmed by the girls' eery similarity shown on screen.
There are the Vianellos, Missy's parents, and the Linnehads, Claire's, with their different life-styles and challenges.
There are friends and peers who are shocked and amazed at the alleged twin-reunion.
And then there is Genevieve. Another girl with another set of parents. Or is she?

The social and emotional effects of identical triplets separated at birth and finding out at age 16, as well as the situation of families with very different finacial means on the eve of College for their daughters, of a young and ambitious couple facing an unwanted pregnancy and two other couples not able to become pregnant and eager not to ask too many questions when offered an opportunity to adopt a baby, the very different personalities of three girls wo look exactly alike and the difficulties to travel from one place to another within a range of 20 miles but with three different states involved... the book in parts resembles an impressionistic-pointillistic painting. The author just puts down dots which seem unrelated at first and slowly develop into the whole picture.

Although no twin dies in this book, the experience of twinloss is described very vividly and convincingly. Cooney obviously did her homework on this subject. The closeness between the "cousins" Missy and Claire is a bit spooky to their parents long before Missy's "hoax" discloses their twinship. They not only text one another all day long, they express a need to hear the other one's voice and meet regularly that goes beyond the expected level. The same goes for the only half-consciously perceived longing for something/someone Missy experiences and which, mysteriously, isn't satisfied even by meeting with Claire every weekend. The way the triplets react to one another when they finally meet is also described empathically and convincingly.
By the way, the different possibilities for a triplet pregnancy to develop are described correctly in this book. Sadly, this is not a given for every fictional book about multiples

At the end of the day, as an adult reader, I'd have to tell the young critics of the book they simply didn't understand its expert grasp of the plot. Caroline B. Cooney did a very good job with this book and even if it spares the reader the pain of the ultimate twinloss and leaves the door open for a very optimistic future for all characters, it's worth a read for twinless twins imhO, maybe specially early loss twins, because it faces the feelings of multiples separated at birth and living their twinship unconsciously for a long time, in a convincing way.

Books on Twinloss N° 14 "The One Left Behind" by Willo Davis Roberts

This small book is one of my favourites. In no more than 140 pages we learn how the loss of a twin differently affects a family and the surviving twin. Acclaimed writer Willo Davis Roberts (1949-2004) introduces the reader to the Sebold family, five boys in different stages of teenage and young adult, schizophrenic uncle Frank (quite a dear) and 11-year old Mandy whose identical twin sister Angel died one year ago.
The family is close but, as it turns out, not close enough to notice that in the general hubbubb of planning a weekend with the parents gone to celebrate their 24th wedding anniversary, Mandy gets left behind at home on her own.
Mandy is left alone in more than one sense. Her family, although grieving for her sister Angel after she died from accidental food poisoning, has moved on. Her brother Bert is newly married, the other brothers have sports and peers and girls to fill their lives. Mandy is drifting through an everyday life that no longer feels like hers and the others don't seem to notice. And now she is left behind when everybody rushes away for the weekend.
Willo Davis Roberts perfectly captures the situation of the young surviving twin in the lines "It occurred to her now, in the middle of the night in the huge silent house, that even if the entire family had been home, she would still be alone. She could not reach out and touch any of them, nor would it mean anything if she could." (p.4)

I sometimes think no more words are needed to describe the feelings of a twinless twin.

But, of course, the book uses some more words, and so we learn about the relationship between Angel and Mandy. How Angel had always been "the best and the smartest and the prettiest" (p.13), the daring one, the one to intiate social contact, and how Mandy realises she is lost without her sister. Their make-believe games played in the coastal area they live in, involving rather risky trips to the beach and deserted lighthouses, for instance, were the twins' favourite past time, and Mandy tries to carry them on on her own. She knows Angel so well she is able to provide her parts as well as her own. The make-believe turns into the life line the little girl unconsciously uses to survive the unsurvivable: the loss of her twin.
And then suspense is added. Willo Davis Roberts was known to write stories full of suspense, mysterious figures and crime and "The One Left Behind" is no exception. First there are noises in the house, empty but for Mandy and the giant family dog, Herry. Then there are foot prints in the sand and a wrecked car in the undergrowth. Mandy knows Angel would not have left any of these things unexplored, and neither does she.

The story of Xander, the boy who kidnapped his little brother from a devious baby-sitter and went to hide at his great-grandmother's beach house not knowing she passed away some time ago, interweaves with Mandy's left-behindness. It's Angel's presence, her sense of still being a twin, that allows Mandy to deal with the situation, make decisions and in the end bring a highly dangerous situation to a good end.
Of course, big dog Herry and her mother's schizophrenic brother Frank also play a part in this, together with the local police officer Clancy who never before had such a crime at his hands. He quite rises to the occasion.

The setting, all in all, is a close-knitted community where people, even the weird ones, look out for one another, and that makes the book thoroughly endearing. The largely unnoticed loneliness of the twinless twin runs like an undercurrent through the story, and is brought to an end satisfactiory for the reader in the concluding lines from Mandy's thoughts that "she was pretty sure that from now on, even all by herself, she would be able to lean on what Angel would have thought or said. Because she knew Angel that well. Nobody would ever be able to change that." (p.138)

It's a childrens book, after all, and the pain and loneliness have to morph into something hopeful for the future, but it's also a book for twinless twins of all ages to spend an hour or two on and savour some lines which really hit the nail on the head. I like to come back to it again and again.

The Drums of Survivor's Guilt

WHY? WHY YOU? WHY NOT ME? WAS IT MY FAULT? WHAT COULD I HAVE DONE TO SAVE YOU?
Early loss surviving twins have these words like a drum beat in the background of their lives. While twins who lose their twins later in life may be subject to a shrill cacophony of these very words, piercing their souls - especially when suicide is involved - early loss twins may go for years without consciously realising the drums are there. They have become a part of everyday life. But they are there, and they are beating on. And on. And on.

Sometimes they are fuelled by heartless - and thoughtless - remarks like "you ate all the food" or even "you ate your twin". Such remarks are not only heartless and thoughtless, theyare utter nonsense. If one twin in utero isn't nourished as well as the other, there are medical reasons for this, never, NEVER, an activity by the other twin. The most common reason is Twin To Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS), in which a pathological connection between blood vessels in the placenta causes the malnourishment in one twin. This, still severe, complication may result in the death of one or both twins, but the twin who is more at risk is almost always the one who gets more blood and seems to be better nourished. The added fluid the so-called Receptor-twin receives puts the heart under severe and possibly fatal stress. So not even in that case when the BS remark quoted above MIGHT be backed by a medical condition would the twin who "ate more" be at fault. Not. One, Tiny. Bit.

In those rare cases when a medical condition MIGHT be interpreted as "you ate your twin", when a fetus-in-fetu is found (the remnants of a deceased embryo found within a living child, mostly found at an early age and at first diagnosed as a tumor), the underlying process of one embryo absorbing the other one happens very early in the pregnancy, long before the twins interact, so that not even a shred of anything similar to a voluntary action can have been present.

In most cases survivor's guilt doesn't need stupid remarks to be sparked. It's just there.
The WHY-question harasses parents, grandparents, siblings alike every time a baby dies, before or after birth. Why should a baby die? It's so completely without sense or reason that life should be gone so soon after it even began, but statistics show that a third of all confirmed pregnancies end in a miscarriage. Singleton babies die unexpectedly in the womb and everybody admits it's a tragedy. When a twin dies, it's more complicated. Mothers think they have no right to grieve since they still have one living child. People, well meaning but every bit as heart- and thoughtless as the ones quoted above, might even say "you still have one baby left."
Nobody, NOBODY, would say that to parents of two children, born two years apart, when one of those tragically dies. "So little Adrian drowned when you were on holidays at the seaside? How very tragic, but at least you have his sister Corinna left. " You see? Unimaginable.

But because grief for a twin baby is complicated for parents the survivor's problems with it often go unnoticed. They, too, may think "I'm not allowed to grieve. I never 'knew' my twin. I have to be happy to be alive. I mustn't add to my parents' grief." Etc.etc.
And all the while they still do grieve, unallowed, they did 'know' their twin with all their existence, physically and emotionally, if not consciously, they are not happy to be alive and they know their parents are worried over them. Tough load for a five-year old, a twelve-year old, a fifteen-year old, a twenty-one-year old.
And there never seems to be an answer. Why me? Why not you?

The co-twin may have been too weak, growth retarded, genetically impaired. There may have been a cord accident, a faulty inserted cord or misplaced placenta. Things that also happen in singleton pregnancies and cause the demise of an unborn child. The moment life is there, the possibility of death also is. We know that, but it isn't an answer.

Naming a medical reason only shifts the WHY. Why didn't I have a cord accident? Why wasn't I a breech? Why were my chromosomes normal?
The drum beats on and on. Softer some days, harsher or even earsplitting and heartbreaking other times. Why me-why not you-why you-why not me...

We try to stifle them. We tell ourselves our twins wouldn't want us to suffer.
Of course they wouldn't. But they're not here. Because of that gigantic WHY.
Our twins are better off. A priest once said that to me. I firmly believe it's true, but it's not an answer. Not to THE WHY.
We will understand it all when we are finally reunited in heaven.
I firmly believe that, too, but not all survivors do, and the drum harasses them on.

Personally I try to see the drum of survivor's guilt as a constant reminder that my twin lived.
If I feel guilty about what happened or may have happened in the womb, if I feel it so strongly that it effects my everyday life even decades after it happened, than it's because something actually did happen. That drum roll doesn't come from nothing. It's an echo of my twin's heartbeat. S/He did have a heartbeat. S/He existed. Take that survivor's guilt! The drum doesn't spell doom, it spells fact. The only answer I can and will hurl at THE WHY is: S/HE LIVED. And his/her heart beats on in my life.
So if I feel survivor's guilt, it doesn't mean I'm less. Less worthy of living. Less capable to deal with things. Less deserving of good things in life. It actually means I'm more. More than my feelings tell me. I'm a twin who lost her co-twin. I'm me. I'm a survivor. I'm the one who felt you, heard your heart beating (unborn babies DO hear things), lived with you.

Survivor's guilt doesn't mean your guilty, it means you're a survivor. And you can only be a suvivor if there was something to survive. A terrible tragedy, even if nobody realised. Your twin's death. Because there as a twin. Because you are a twin. For always.

Twin substitutes and the art of making life complicated for me and others

From the diary of a twin substitute:

1.10. I told x I really like her. She beamed at me and seemed so happy. It felt good, I'm glad to be her friend.
3.10. Had coffee with x. We talked a lot. It was nice.
8.10. X seems to be mad at me. I have no idea why.


From the diary of a twinless twin.

1.10. Y has told me he likes me. I'm so happy. It feels like I have my twin back.
3.10. I really feel connected to Y. Like he was my twin. I feel I can tell him anything.
5.10. Y hasn't whatsapped me in 36 hours. I feel he doesn't like me anymore.
6.10. I feel so abandonned. Y has seen my messages but didn't reply. It's like losing my twin all over again.
8.10. Saw Y shortly downtown but couldn't talk much, I hurt so.

I was introduced to the term Twin Substitute through Dr. Barbara Klein's "Alone in the Mirror". Many twinless twins do this, look for a twin substitute. There are even some wo succeed, who find a person who is not a twin but happy to try and play the part. It's rare but not unheard of and there are people who win the lottery, too.

Most of us fail, and for early loss twins it's especially hard because we mostly don't know what is even going on. We just notice we are really, really, REALLY bad at relationships. People tend to distance themsleves from us after an initial time of seemingly entering into a close friendship, we are misunderstood or misinterpreted. As small kids we are labelled "over demanding" or "fussy" or "attention seeking". Parents and teachers think they need to teach us "it's not about us all the time."
I have a sneaking presumption that most kids who are called "over demanding" at age 3,4 or 5 and older are really wombtwin survivors. Only nobody knows, not even the kids themselves.

Those kids are never content. They demand constant attention from an adult. They over-share, try to sit next to a teacher, overflow with talk, hord toys but still want new ones, develop intense interests in changing subjects and want to talk about them. They generally wreck their parents' and teacher's nerves and specialists will tell these parents and teachers that the child "has to learn not everything is about him/her".
Well, it isn't. It's about the twin.

Those children grew in the womb with a constant presence. Everything they experienced was shared, and there was much. The first hiccup! Can you imagine what a sensation the first hiccup is? And your twin noticed the slight disturbance in the amniotic fluid! Look at this! I'm hiccuping! Here it goes again!!!
Everything that happened happened shared.
And then this kid is born alone. Sharing is still natural but now there is nobody close enough to share things with immediately. When I was about four family legend has it that I was staying at my grandmother's and as usual would trot in her wake through the house and comment on everything I saw or heard or felt. Suddenly I stopped and exclaimed:"You have to say something, too, Oma. I don't want to do all the talking by myself."
Isn't that cute?
It isn't. It's desperate. I needed the presence of my twin to share things with effortlessly and Grandma wouldn't play the part. She'd be occupied with things SHE didn't share with ME. She had her own world - preparing lunch, most likely-  and though she loved me and liked to have me with her, she didn't share her existence with me. Her breathing, her moving around, the grumbling in her stomach, her need to go to the restroom soon...
I did. I shared all these details, but then I was a four-year-old and a talkative one. My parents thought I was unusually advanced for my age and needed more challenges,
Actually I was looking for a twin substitute.
For a while I found the perfect one. A rainbow-coloured toy brush.
I took it with me everywhere, called it my "doggy" and talked to it. My parents were worried and releaved when "the phase" wore out.

In later life, whenever I attempted to find a friend, my idea of friendship was to be connected 24/7, to talk to each other every day at least once and to share everything. Thoughts, feelings and things,
Needless to say none of these attempts at finding friends ever ammounted to much. People found me weird, clingy, "overly present" and - hello, old friend! - "over demanding".
I took me decades to find out what was going wrong. I was treating them as twin substitutes.
Few non-twins can stand that.

As long as I didn't know I was a twin I was just trying to recreate my twinship unconsciously and frightening people off very effectively.
After I knew I was  a twin I tried to concentrate on recreating my twinship by finding out as much about my real twin as I could. I thought the problem of twin substitutes would be solved that way.
It wasn't.
Lately I discovered while I'm trying to recreate the good things about twinship by symbolizing my twin through names, pictures, songs and poems I'm shifting all the bad things on the poor twin subtitutes. They are the ones who abandon me. They are the ones who stop talking to me (to stop talking to a twinless twin is a powerful thing to do. When the deceased twin stopped responding in the womb, reality as I knew it crashed around and inside me). They are the ones who have to bear all the loss and the pain and the despair of my twinloss. And they don't have the faintest idea what's going on at all (see diary entry above).

I know this by now, but I still don't know how to handle it.
If a twin substitute doesn't reply to my Whatsapp, my world ends. I literally feel the ground shake beneath my feet. My existence is questioned (Yes, it IS!) and I feel a physical pain in my chest and stomach. It destroys me.
Like it destroyed my twin and thus the precursor of identity I had in the womb.
The presence of my twin is not something I long for, I want to have back or I'd feel better with, it's as necessary for my existence as the air I breath, as water and food.
But there are terribly many people in this world who have to go without as much water and food as they need. The fact that I need something doesn't mean I'll get it.

For the sake of any budding friendship I may still be granted in this life and for the sake of those poor souls I choose for twin substitutes I have to find a way to control my desperate need to share every breath with my twin (substitute), hear from him/her daily, feel the connection 24/7.
I just don't know yet how to do this.

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...