#withoutmytwin

A few days into 2023, and I’m struggling to comprehend what has happened and where my personal life has taken me. I could never have envisaged a life without my twin.

I’m not sure how she views her life in spirit, but the split is difficult. I’ve not known my life without being a twin. I’ve never lived a single life.

Leaving my home to head to London for Christmas 2022 was enormously difficult. It didn't feel right. Throughout the journey I was teary. I wasn’t ready, it felt forced and scary. Now for the first time I feel as though I am on my own. Having read other people’s twin stories on social media, my twin-loss experiences are very much the pattern.

In 2023 as I begin my journey as a twinless twin, the twin link is there. The good and bad experiences we shared, remain a focus. It’s a link that isn’t easily severed.

All I can do is continue to work on my mental health, in the hope that I can begin to feel better. It’s not something that just corrects itself, but it’s something I need to continue to work on.

Well, I go on to fight another day. After my twin’s funeral on the 21st December, yesterday was my first day as a twinless twin. Coming up to Christmas, it is even more difficult.

A twinless twin, is an individual who had a twin but who has died. Whether as a twin you were close or not, the twin connection is very real. You were conceived together, you grew in the womb together, you shared a life and that link never severs or diminishes.

There is no getting away from the fact that my life has changed from being a twin to being twinless. But you never stop being a twin. I was born a twin, I will die a twin, when it’s my time to ‘go.’

For surviving twins, without our living twin, we still see ourselves as twins. I have my own personality, and as an author and writer, I have carved out my own life, but I am still a twin. Losing Sheila hasn’t changed that. I can only describe losing a twin, like losing a limb. No matter how our environment or our upbringing changed our personalities, or changed us, we are still twins.

There isn’t an abundance of research out there to quantify losing a twin, but the studies that do exist, talk about the surviving twin feeling a prolonged sense of grief that is different to that of a sibling or relative that isn’t a spouse.