One and the Same (23 page)

The night before 9/11, Greg left Stephen a phone message, suggesting they go surfing at dawn near their homes on Long Island; they often started the workday that way. “If we had gone surfing, he wouldn't have been at his desk at eight o'clock,” Greg says. “How often I've said to myself, If I'd only have made him go surfing.”

Hoffman seems eager to recount this nightmare to a fellow twin. (He has signed all his e-mails to me “In twinship.”) “I have trouble explaining this to people,” he says. “I tell them, ‘Remember when the North Tower was burnt out like a shell but still standing; to me, that's what a twinless twin is.' You're still there, but you're not. And you never will be. There's not a day or a moment that goes by that I don't think about him. But he's alive in my conversations, like this one. If you want someone to truly be dead, stop talking about him. If you ask me why it's so great to tell you all this, it's because it keeps him alive. I could talk about Stephen all night.”

He takes a bite of his burger.

“You know how twinship is such a tactile thing,” he continues. “You reach out and touch your sister. Imagine suddenly you don't have that anymore. I have two beautiful daughters, a beautiful wife, ten other brothers and sisters, my mom and dad, great friends, but I still felt like I was in an enormous, inescapable black hole. I remember Saint Patrick's Day, 2003, I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge; I stopped and I looked out over the edge and I said to myself, Three steps and my pain is gone. That's how bad it got sometimes. You just wanted the pain to stop.” He calls to mind this description in Diane Setterfield's novel
The Thirteenth Tale:
“The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable. The horizon is in a different place. The sun has changed color. Nothing remains of the terrain you know. As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living. It's no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had perished with the others.”

Gregory's wife, Aileen, a social worker, is a petite, attractive woman dressed in a blazer and slacks when I meet her separately in my
apartment. “He really spiraled down,” she says in a calming voice that suits her profession. “It has changed him profoundly. There are some days that I feel like we're starting all over again. I'm grateful I have Gregory alive. But it comes with a huge change.”

Aileen decided to track down other twin survivors of 9/11 so that Gregory could connect with people going through the same unique torment. She found seventeen twins at first, but when the
New York Times
ran an article about her search, other twins came forward. “I ultimately found forty-five twins,” Aileen recalls. “We had two social events when we brought all the twinless twins—I hate that phrase—together. It was very moving.”

She and Greg also attended an annual gathering of twin survivors, organized by a group called Twinless Twins, which has ten chapters in the United States and four in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. “Twins spend four days telling each other sad stories about how they lost their twins,” Aileen explains. “In some ways, it really saved Greg.” In July 2008, some eighty people attended the Twinless Twins gathering in Toronto, according to the
National Post
. One twin explained why the loss is acute, whenever it happens: “You meet your twin before you meet your mother.” Another twin, Davona Patterson, forty-four, who lost her twin to cancer, told the paper, “It's not an occasional breakdown, it's an everyday breakdown. There's only one of me now.”

Gregory tells me that Aileen could fathom his bottomless anguish, but it was more complicated dealing with Stephen's wife. “Gabrielle and I had The Fight—about which is more important, a spouse or a twin,” Greg says soberly. “And I said, ‘Gabrielle, don't ask me to answer that question. Because you're not going to like the answer.' She was going through her shit and I was going through mine, but I
wasn't
going to minimize my twinship. I told her, ‘Stephen and I were together since we were conceived.' I wasn't going to stand there and say I loved him more, but one thing I did say was, ‘You can go find another husband; I can't go find another twin.' She stormed
out, yelled at me. It was hurtful to her. And I've never brought it up again.”

Aileen, who remains extremely close to her sister-in-law (they have daughters fourteen months apart), saw the friction building between Greg and Gabrielle. “People were trying to measure who had more grief,” Aileen says. “I think when you're in pain, especially in a tragedy like this, you want to stand on the rooftops and say,
‘I'm in so much pain.'
And if you have a way to measure it, to say that one is more than the other, you try.”

Aileen describes the Hoffman twins' friendship as “magnificent.” She met them her first day at Buffalo State College (she was a freshman; they were seniors) and remembers being dazzled. “They were electric.” She smiles. “Literally the friendliest guys you've ever met in your life.” Both loud, both economics majors, both Republicans, both working at the student union flipping eggs, they talked very fast, and were the hub of the social scene. “Everybody knew Gregory and Stephen,” she says decisively. “The two most popular guys on campus.”

Even on her wedding day, Aileen says, Greg and Steve were still riffing on their twinship. “Gregory wore a button that said ‘I'm the groom' ”—Aileen laughs—“and Stephen wore one that said ‘I'm the best man.' And people still got them mixed up. When the wedding was all said and done and we went back to my house, Greg and Stephen were saying good-bye to each other outside; they were hugging, and they kept touching each other. It was as if they were saying good-bye to that chapter of their life.”

Gregory admits he is still grappling with how to be an uncle to his twin's daughter, Madeline, eleven, when we meet, without appearing to insinuate himself as a replacement father. “When Madeline hugs me, I don't mind if she pretends it's her dad she's hugging. Because I know how much I look like him. I remember right after he died, she said, ‘Uncle Greg, can I call you “Daddy” now?' What an emotional bomb that was. I said, ‘Madeline, your dad is your dad. Not that I
mind being called that, but it's not fair to him. I'm never going to replace your dad.' That's what I said to her when she was six years old.”

It's clearly a sensitive subject—that he doesn't see Madeline more often; he's not sure how much Gabrielle wants him around, and he admits he doesn't always know how to be with his niece. “I feel terrible about that,” he says. “I ask myself, Would Steve be happy with the time I'm spending with Mad? No, he wouldn't be. But he probably understands.”

I ask if Gregory has ever wished he could trade places with his brother.

“The answer is, I wouldn't want Stephen to go through this kind of pain. He had a horrible death—I can't imagine what a horrible two hours he had, but then it was over and he was at peace. For me, it's five years and counting, and I wouldn't wish this on him. It's the one downside of being a twin: if you're the one who survives losing the other one. It's knowing what you had and knowing you'll never, ever, ever have anything quite like it again.”

I tell him that I doubt Robin and I think about the fact that one of us could be gone at any moment. “You shouldn't,” Gregory insists. “But recognize what you have. Stephen and I always understood how great we had it. My sense from you is that you and Robin don't take each other for granted. That's not going to change the fact, Abby, that one day it's going to happen to one of you. And you know what? It sucks.”

Hoffman gave me not only a glimpse of destabilizing sorrow but also what felt like an urgent message: Live consciously. Know that you can't fathom what you would be—or would no longer be—alone.

I've never thought of myself as being held together by Robin but neither have I considered whether I'd fall apart or be diminished without her. Hoffman's description that “you're still there, but you're not” tells me that I might ultimately be not just one without Robin, but
less than
one. He suggested she's more integral to my daily strength
and character than I realize. Who am I without my twin? Do any of us twins discover that without being forced to?

Nancy Segal's studies on twin bereavement found not only that identical twins have higher initial “grief intensity ratings” than fraternal twins but that the grief ratings for twins are equal to those for bereaved spouses. My guess is that most twins would expect those results.

In his book
Wish I Could Be There
, Allen Shawn talks about his lost twin, Mary, and maintains that the age-old maxim “We are born alone and we die alone” is inadequate in his case: “For twins, this statement needs to be amended. We are born with company, but we die alone.”

Former
Baywatch
actress Alexandra Paul said five words in the middle of our interview that make her weep abruptly: “If something happened to her …” She couldn't continue for a moment. And then she echoed Gregory Hoffman exactly: “It would be worse than if my husband died. You can fall in love again, but you can never get another twin.”

Liza and Jamie Persky, near forty when I interviewed them at a Manhattan café, admitted that they constantly think the worst when they can't reach each other. “If either one of us is not where we say we're going to be, we think we're dead,” Liza stated.

“We think we're dead all the time,” Jamie affirmed. “And people will hear about it. Like I'll get home and there will be like eighteen phone messages: ‘Your sister thinks you're dead.'”

Liza: “I panic.”

Jamie: “We also have a code—”

Liza: “We made a code thirty years ago that if anything was ever wrong with one of us, like if you have a gunman holding a gun to your head and you can't let on, you'll pick up the phone, and the code is—”

In unison: “How's Dale?”

Jamie: “That was our Irish setter when we were like nine.”

Liza: “We know if you ever hear that, then you're really in trouble.”

The world of twin loss—and it feels like a whole universe once you enter it—extends powerfully to parents who have lost a twin. One pioneering organization, CLIMB—the Center for Loss in Multiple Birth—was started in Alaska in 1986 by Jean Kollantai, who lost one of her fraternal-twin sons just days before his birth; his brother emerged healthy.

I meet Kollantai, forty-seven, at the Ghent International Twins Conference. She's dressed in a patterned blue skirt and black sandals, and we sit in a grassy courtyard with our egg-salad sandwiches on our laps. “My introduction to parenthood,” she says in a gentle voice, “was literally holding these two full-term babies, where one was alive and one was dead.”

She says she did not get hysterical right away, and having spoken to hundreds of grieving parents over these last twenty-plus years, she attests that most do appear calm at first. “You have to experience it yourself before you know how you would react. It takes a long time. And I guess a lot of the calm was my thinking, Well, if I'm really good for Christmas, he'll come back.”

Kollantai felt lucky to be able to take her deceased son, Andrew, and his surviving twin, Berney, back to their house in Palmer, Alaska. Though it may sound counterintuitive to want to take a dead baby home, that's exactly what she suggests outsiders don't grasp: how important it is to spend time with both twins together. “After the autopsy was done, we took both of them in the car,” she says almost proudly. “So we were able to be home with both sons.”

The story gets more agonizing: They had to keep Andrew's body outdoors overnight so it would not decompose. “It was zero degrees that spring, and we had to leave him outside,” Kollantai recounts. “It was really strange to come home from the hospital and leave one baby
in the car all night in zero degrees. But that was the only way we could have him with us.”

Kollantai's written guide to counselors of grieving parents stresses the importance of holding the lifeless baby, even if he or she was deceased before birth. Apparently, parents are more likely to get the chance to hold their dead infant if it was alive at birth and
then
died—hours or days after. But when a twin is
born
dead, it's often whisked away, and the surviving twin is treated, Kollantai writes, “as if he was a single baby, all there had ever been.”

During Andrew's makeshift funeral service at home, his mother remembers, his twin, Berney, became unusually agitated. “He'd been very mellow until then,” she recalls. “Then he started screaming and never stopped.”

They buried Andrew with family photographs, on which she'd written messages, plus a few of the toys they'd bought for the twins they'd been expecting. (Kollantai's guide for counselors also suggests other keepsakes, such as footprints or locks of hair.)

She says so many people said the wrong things to her at the time that she resolved to create a more compassionate resource for parents experiencing the same kind of heartbreak. CLIMB's first newsletter was published in 1987, and the response was overwhelming. “You have no idea how many people have had multiple-birth loss.”

Kollantai tells me few realize how complete a human can seem without ever having made a sound. “This was a baby whom I already loved,” she says of her son Andrew. “He was a baby I'd wanted and had been very aware of in utero. I was dealing with the shocking loss of a child, the concept that he was really not coming back. Ever.”

She says she had to let go of the image of her twins growing up together. “If I was buying something for Berney in a store, I'd think, I should be buying two. If it was quiet in the house, I'd think, It shouldn't be quiet like this; both of them should be crying. I felt I could nurse on only one side because the other side was Andrew's.”