 Lone twins Lone twins 2: dealing with loss
Lone twins 3: roles
Lone twins 4: remembering
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Lone twins
Few people understand the emotional agonies suffered by twins when one of them dies – even before birth. A support group has now been set up to help them live with their loss Patricia Foster says she still feels like half a person, even though it’s more than 40 years since her identical twin Joan died at the age of seven. “I think of myself as a twin, I’ve never felt whole,” she says. Yet she rarely mentions Joan; even a friend she’d known for 25 years and with whom she was staying when I arrived for the interview, was astonished by the news. “I never knew that, you never told me!” she said. Asked for an explanation, Patricia says, “I’m not denying Joan, I’m protecting her in case someone says something insensitive or dismissive.” Simon Gledhill, 46, would understand this. His twin, James, died when they were two days old but he has always seen himself as a twin, always mourned the relationship he lost. “Try explaining that to a singleton,” he says. “They just don’t get it. Most people’s reaction is, ‘You didn’t know him, how can you miss him?’ But twins always understand.”
This is why the support group Lone Twin Network (LTN) affords such comfort to people like Patricia and Simon. There is no one-upmanship of grief among its members: they all know that the death of a twin – whenever it happens – is like an amputation. In fact, when Joan Woodward, founder of the network, was researching a book, The Lone Twin, she was surprised to find that the group most likely to define their loss as “severe” were those where the twin’s death had occurred before the age of six months.
Can we “singletons” comprehend this? The wonders of television documentaries allow us to sit in our own homes and, through highly sophisticated cameras, watch twins relating to one another in the womb, but does this lead us to appreciate the bond these babies form? In Joan Woodward’s book, Bryony Goode, whose identical twin sister died a few days before their birth, relates: “I even have a strong sense that we lay close together, with her back curled against my stomach. "When I get flashes of this image it feels so real. I can ‘feel’ her skin and the warmth of her body and everything is quiet and so peaceful. I often had the feeling that I had something missing the length of my body long before I had these memories.” Can a singleton imagine, as Bryony does earlier in this passage, how her unborn infant self may have felt when her sister stopped responding and lay dead by her side? Written by Serena Allott Read page 2 of the Lone Twins
This article was created: 4 September 2006.
This article was last edited: 15 February 2007.
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