One and the Same (24 page)

There was also the question of whether she should tell people
that she was the mother of twin boys, or one son. “I'd go into stores and people would say, ‘Oh, he's the most beautiful baby I ever saw.' And I'd say, ‘Yes, well, he was really twins.' I'd just blurt that out.”

I ask Kollantai if she still marks Andrew's birthday, or whether she thinks that's morbid. As soon as I utter the word
morbid
, I notice her stiffen. “You have to get rid of abstract terms like
morbid,”
she cautions me. She says it gently, but I know it's a rebuke. “It's easy to put judgments on things.”

I see why
morbid
could seem judgmental, but I want to hear Kollantai's reasons, because I
do
think society expects people to get over it—especially when one child is alive. Indeed, Kollantai has written about the fact that “all parents are under tremendous internal and external pressure to ‘focus on the living baby,' consider themselves lucky, consider the one who died at best a nice extra that didn't work out. Many are told that their grieving would ‘hurt' the living baby.”

In her guide, she challenges the attitude that mournful parents should focus on the twin they have, not the twin they lost: “We have had to find, the hard way, that truly no one replaces anyone—not even a genetically identical person or people born also to you at exactly the same time.”

While Kollantai and I meet, Berney is busy applying to college; Kollantai says she believes he was never burdened by the twin he never knew. Still, when he was growing up, Andrew was very much a presence. “On Berney's tenth birthday,” Kollantai recalls, “I said, ‘If you could spend an evening with anyone in the world, who would it be?' Berney is a history buff, and I thought he was going to say ‘Winston Churchill.' But he said, ‘The baby.'”

Elizabeth Pector, a family physician who works with Kollantai and who also lost one of her twin boys, enumerated the issues that surface after the loss of an infant twin:

• The surviving twin can grow up feeling guilty that he/she survived, or feel unprotected by parents who weren't able to save the other twin.
  

• The living twin can feel the burden of being a constant reminder to his/her parents and relatives of the twin who didn't make it—especially if they're identical.
  

• Parents can feel overprotective of their surviving twin, even convinced that they'll lose that one, too. Or they can neglect the living twin because they are still mourning the dead one.
  

• Some parents feel robbed not only of their second child but of the specialness of being a parent of twins—all the attention, status, and adventure that would have conferred.
  

• Parents can feel strain in the marriage—especially if one parent feels the other is grieving too long or not enough.
  

• Finally: If a mother is depressed, says Pector, she's more likely to project some kind of depression onto her surviving twin, thinking, “Oh, my poor baby is so lonely—every time he stares into space, he's thinking about his twin.” Pector herself couldn't help but read into her son's “uncanny awareness of his shadow,” and his obsession with mirrors as a baby: “If he saw himself in a mirror at Kmart or Target, we couldn't get him away from it.”
  

• •

Simon Mills, who lives in London, lost his identical twin, Nicholas, in 2004 to suicide. The Mills brothers were both serious heroin users and dealers, and the night of Nicholas's death, they had argued about the fact that Nick was still shooting heroin instead of smoking it (apparently, the former is more lethal), when suddenly Simon stormed out. He returned later, to find his brother asphyxiated by a shoelace he'd tied to a window ledge.

The Mills twins were cheerful, athletic boys who morphed into heroin junkies by age sixteen. After Nicholas's death at age twenty-six, their schoolteacher mom, Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, wrote a book about how she'd been an unwitting enabler:
Mum Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid?: What Drugs Did to My Family
. Simon helped write the
book, he says, to make sure it was accurate; he felt it wouldn't help another family if it wasn't unsparingly true.

“We were doing a thousand dollars' worth of drugs a day and selling thirty thousand,” he tells me on a long-distance call. He describes how they actually exploited their twinship to support their habit. “We used the whole identical thing to steal from shops: we'd have one of us going around to the alcohol counter, picking up a couple of bottles, making it look obvious, and then the other doing it less obviously, so the more obvious one
looked
like he was stealing, and then put the bottles on the counter right before he walked out. Just to confuse them.”

When Simon buried his brother, he enclosed a poem he'd written, the last two lines of which read: “Please forgive me as I forgave you/As I know as a single I will always be two.”

Simon is a member of the Lone Twin Network, based in Great Britain, which was founded by attachment therapist Joan Woodward, whose own twin died at three years old. In Woodward's book
The Lone Twin: A Study in Bereavement and Loss
, one of her central findings was not surprising: that losing a twin is “profound”—more so if the death was “traumatic” or when the twins were of the same sex.

But Woodward's more startling discovery was that those twins who described their loss as “severe” tended to have lost the other twin before the age of six months. Woodward attributed the heightened distress in those who lost their twin in infancy to the fact that the surviving twin had no speech to express and process grief. She also posited that the surviving infant twin would absorb a parent's devastation more enduringly.

Simon Mills has listened to these “twin survivors” in support groups, and he finds it hard to believe that the loss of a newborn twin could compare to his. “At the annual meeting, you'll have twins there who never even
met
their twins: Their twins died at birth, but they feel they're missing something. … They're not whole. I found it very difficult to deal with at first. I said, ‘You never even knew them; I
spent twenty-seven years, day in and day out, with Nick. How could you possibly know what I'm going through?' But the more you go to these meetings and the more you realize how disturbed these people are, whether it's a twin who died before birth or after, they're still there and they're still mourning.”

In Kim Edwards's best-selling novel,
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
, a mother, Norah, talking to her husband, David, insists that their fraternal-twin boy surely misses the sister he lost at birth:

The trauma of early twin loss—as early as in utero—has garnered a certain legitimacy in recent years. No concrete science exists to support the psychological impact, but there is compelling anecdotal evidence that people who started out as one of a set of twins and ended up being born alone report similar feelings of loneliness, incompleteness, and fear of abandonment.

I heard Althea Hayton speak on the subject at the triannual International Twins Congress in Ghent, Belgium, in June 2007. Hayton, fifty-five when I meet her, is an Oxford graduate working as a social worker in Britain, and the editor of
Untwinned: Perspectives on the Death of a Twin Before Birth
. “I am, I think, a survivor of a twin pregnancy,” she announces at the podium. “But I have absolutely no proof.” She doesn't deny the lack of substantiation, but she puts more credence than most in the hundreds of personal testimonies she's collected.

“Until about twenty years ago and the development of pre-natal psychology,” Hayton writes in her book's introduction, “it was generally assumed—if one thought about it at all—that there is no way a surviving twin would remember being with their twin in the first months of born life, let alone being in the womb with a co-twin who
died early in pregnancy. … It stretches the imagination somewhat to learn that a dead twin, who was presumably never known to the survivor, can be the subject of a sense of grief and loss, but clearly this is the case, at least for some.”

Hayton is imposing in person; tall and sturdy, with a gray helmet of hair, she speaks with a plummy English accent and great fervor. I felt like I was being instructed by a stern but compassionate governess as she explained her mission. “I'm using my own intuition and my own sense of my surviving-twin experience to try to establish a pattern or a characteristic response that sums up what I'm seeing, that I can then convey to people who've
not
lost a twin and haven't a
clue
what I'm talking about,” she tells me. “I get no resistance from people who have lost a twin; they take it as completely normal. And then other people think I'm totally off the wall, that I must be completely mad.”

Though Hayton's work is controversial, the founding premise is not: It's well established that one out of ten or eleven pregnancies begin as
twins
, but somewhere during the first trimester, one twin dies and is frequently absorbed in the uterus, essentially disappearing. (At the same conference, Dr. Jan Gerris, head of gynecology at the University of Ghent, puts the number of so-called vanishing twins at between 10 and 20 percent of pregnancies. Salvator Levi of Brussels's University Hospital found that, out of 6,690 women he examined, “71 percent of twin gestations diagnosed before ten weeks were singletons when delivered.”

Often there is no physical trace of this nascent second life, but there can be indicators, such as unusual placentas or third-trimester bleeding. Hayton says she's even been told of “residue” of the lost twin being left in the womb—an additional finger, ribs, or “bits of bowel.” (Twin Kay Cassill, a journalist and the author of
Twins: Nature's Amazing Mystery
, wrote, “The potential exists that such an undiscoverable twin
might
be hidden away within
any
singleton.”)

“Even as early as the Greek and Hindu physicians,” says cultural
historian Hillel Schwartz, “they had found these remnants of the fetuses of one twin: ‘fetus papyraceus'—the dry tissue that sometimes appears along with the afterbirth of one child; the assumption then was that it had been another twin that hadn't survived in the womb. And this was the biological origin of the notion of a vanishing twin: a twin who was there at some point but, even before birth, disappeared.

“But then in the 1970s, when they began using ultrasound in pregnancy, they discovered larger and larger numbers of fetuses whose evidence was clearly there in the first three or four months but who were never born. Eventually, they began to speculate that a third to a half of all conceptions are conceptions of twins—maybe even more, depending on whom you read.”

When I was listening to Althea Hayton in Ghent, I suddenly remembered the day my own gynecologist pointed to a second black dot on the sonogram screen, early on in my first pregnancy. He said it could develop into a twin but that it might not. Sure enough, the next time we looked, it was gone.

“The loss of a twin in the womb does have a psychological effect on the survivor,” Hayton asserted. “It's vague and difficult to talk about.” Thanks to 350 questionnaires and scores of interviews, Hayton pieced together a psychological profile of a surviving twin:

1. Deep down, I feel alone, even when I am among friends (70%).
   

2. I have been searching for something all my life but I don't know what it is (64%).
   

3. I fear abandonment or rejection (62%).
   

4. I know I am not realising my true potential (62%).
   

5. All my life I have felt in some way “incomplete” (61%).
   

I have the strangest thought listening to her list:
She's describing my son, Benjamin
. It doesn't fit exactly—Ben is much more buoyant and sure-footed than those five statements suggest—but it does echo
aspects of his personality: a fear of being lost or left, a conviction that he's not doing as well as he should be (even when he's excelling), a sense of being incomplete (that something's wrong, though he can't put his finger on what), and an awareness that he sometimes stands apart from the group, even when he's in the thick of it.

I called my husband, David, and read him Hayton's list. He was intrigued but not convinced; he thought Ben's traits could be due to the way he's wired and have nothing to do with a vanished twin—if, indeed, there ever was one.

At a cocktail party the evening of Hayton's talk, I cornered her to tell her about my son, and, not surprisingly, she thought my description confirmed what she'd heard so many times. “It sounds to me like he has all those characteristics,” she said. “I've been given this information over and over again from people who say, ‘This is how I feel,' who have a real sense of their twinship, and all they have is ultrasonic information. It says something about the twin bond, about the nature of consciousness. It says something about the nature of self. It is so huge that sometimes it takes my breath away. All I'm saying now is, ‘Let's listen to these people's stories and just think for a second,
Is it possible—just remotely possible—that some of what they're saying has to do with the fact that they've lost a twin?'
And explore that. That's what I'm doing.”

I ask if these self-identified “womb survivors” talk about anxiety, which has dogged Ben at times. “They're often fearful.” Hayton nods. “But they don't know what of.” That rings true for Ben. “And so they come across as shy.” Ben used to. “And they get bullied.” He did as a toddler. “And they worry about nothing.” True of Ben. “And they feel guilty about absolutely nothing.” True. “They're always apologizing.” Also true.