LETTER – Being a ‘surviving twin’ leaves a special kind of vacuum

Dear Armchair Mayor,

I feel that many people received something of value when earlier this year you wrote about suicide.   It is extremely difficult to lose someone you know to suicide and it’s a subject that needs to be open for people to share and grieve.

Something about my situation has made me part of a group of people who are a surviving twin.  It isn’t an easy subject to discuss.  But, within the body of your readers there are likely others who find themselves alone in life after the death of their twin.

In my case, this Sunday is the anniversary of the death of my twin brother.  At that time, the world was locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic.  That meant that I was unable to travel to be with him in his last days and when he died.

The guilt of that is still present.  Even though it wasn’t my fault, twins never think that we aren’t going to be there for the other in sickness and in death.  We texted and did voice calls as often as we could.  Two days before he died we talked to each other.  Then came the vacuum.

“Surviving twins” face a few or many different changes in life when death happens to the other twin.  Our shared life started in the womb. (I sometimes get a smile or two when I tell people my twin and I were “womb-mates”.) There have been multiple times when I wish that I could have gone first.  He had so much more in life; more family, kids and grandchildren.  He hadn’t been seriously ill until the diagnosis.  I was the one who had a chronic illness and went through surgeries, meds and loss of work with Crohn’s.  It was expected (with me) that I should be the one to die first.

Something of a twin’s identity as a person is bound to the other twin.  We were always called “the twins” by our family members.  We curled together and hunted together.  Now those things are done alone.  They don’t feel the same now.

For other “surviving twins” who may be reading, you aren’t alone.  Sympathy isn’t what we want.  Understanding perhaps is a better way of putting it.

JOHN NOAKES,
Citizen of Westmount