It has been nearly four years since my twin died, and I can see more clearly now what her death uncovered.
Grief stripped away a layer of my life that had sat quietly in the background. While my twin was alive, there was someone else who had lived through parts of the same childhood.
I had spent decades dealing with the effects of trauma, but I did not always consciously realise how much trauma was shaping my life. Instead, the experiences felt like separate situations that I had to manage and overcome.
Although my twin and I shared some of the same experiences, I didn't think about how those experiences affected us differently. You don't have to be a twin, I just don't think you do. Looking back, I knew I was struggling, but I didn't have the words or understanding to explain what I was feeling or to recognise that trauma was at the centre of it.
Only through time have I begun to see the connections between those experiences and understand how much they have influenced me.
Her death has changed that.
In the early days of grief, the loneliness, the memories and the disorientating reality of being a twin whose other half was no longer here became louder. But as the years have passed, I’ve come to understand that grief wasn’t creating all of what I was feeling.
Some of it was already there.
Having spent decades living with what I later learned was cerebral palsy, autism, anxiety, depression, and long-term trauma, much of my energy had gone into simply getting through life. Survival had always come first, although I never consciously realised that’s what it was.
Losing my twin disrupted the structure that had existed around that survival.
When she was alive, it’s not that I had everything worked out – far from it. I’d spent years trying to make sense of my life, but it still had a shape. I understood the brief.
Her death tore up the papers that brief was written on.
For a long time, it felt as though I was starting again. Nearly four years on, I’m not sure that’s how I would describe it now. You don’t start again after a loss like this. You carry forward what was there before, what has been lost, and what you’ve discovered about yourself along the way.
The trauma of losing my twin hasn’t just been about her absence. Her death exposed fractures that were already there – things buried beneath years of coping, and surviving.
I can see those fractures more clearly now.
That doesn’t mean I’ve resolved everything grief uncovered. Some things don’t resolve neatly. But understanding where some of the pain comes from has changed my relationship with it.
What once felt like one overwhelming experience has gradually become something I can look at in its different parts: grief, trauma, memory, loneliness, disability, identity and the particular experience of continuing life as a twin without my twin.
Life is different now.
Four years doesn’t make that less true. If anything, time has shown me how permanent some of those changes are. But I’m no longer standing where I was when grief first stripped everything back.
Although I write about twin loss, what grief uncovers isn’t unique to twins. Loss has a way of exposing wounds we may have carried for years without knowing they were there.
Perhaps that’s one of the harder things grief asks of us: not only to live with who we’ve lost, but to understand more about the life we were already carrying before they died.
In understanding those wounds, we can begin to understand ourselves.
