I push Hayton a little further: “When people tell you this is hog-wash—that it’s just convenient for people to say, ‘So this is why I’m depressed!’ or ‘This is why I feel lonely!’—how do you answer them?”
“I would say that there are so many different reasons that psychiatrists and psychologists throw at you to explain why you’re lonely or depressed. They say you were abused as a child; they’ll say you didn’t bond with your parents; they’ll say it’s because you were adopted or went to boarding school; they’ll say you were beaten by your father; they’ll say you were transcultural and you don’t know who you are. They’ll throw thousands of different reasons at you about why you have a very poor sense of self, and then you don’t believe any of them. You go from one therapist to the next and they tell you all this crap. Hallo! I said ‘crap,’ didn’t I? I call it ‘crap’ because it’s a completely reversed alternative perception.”
Reversed alternative perception?
“Everyone’s got it all upside down! It’s got nothing to do with what happens after birth. It’s what happened before birth that mattered! These people were born like this. Nothing has made them that way. They were born with a predisposition because they’d lost a twin. And then, if nasty things also happen later, like adoption or whatever, then they really suffer, in ways that other adopted children won’t. So it’s not the actual events of childhood that are distressing; it’s your response to those events because of an earlier loss that shaped you. It’s like your boy, Ben; should you, for example, lose your husband tomorrow, he’d be wrecked. Because he won’t be able to handle death at all. Another kid would just be okay and say, ‘So we’ll get on with it, then.’ But if you have a very sensitive, empathetic, intuitive kid who’s picking up on pain everywhere, whenever a really bad event happens, he’s completely squashed. Totally lost. So they come across as very vulnerable.”
Does Hayton believe these twins remember their vanished twins in some way?
“Well, it’s not in their memory,” she replies. “It’s a kind of imprinting. I call it ‘the Dream of the Womb.’ Because it’s like a dream. It’s in the deepest, darkest place in your mind, right at the very back. But it’s also right at the very front. So you see the world through it. Everything is seen as the loss of your twin.”
It’s interesting to see that two of the OB-GYNs who specialize in twins and who clearly respect each other—obstetricians Louis Keith and Birgit Arabin—disagree on the legitimacy of “vanished twin syndrome.” Whereas Keith heartily recommends Hayton’s book (and wrote the introduction), Arabin is skeptical. “I don’t think that any fetus will remember what has happened between weeks four and eight,” she tells me. “Though there are paramedical psychoanalysts who think that you already felt pain at the conception. I heard a lecture once and I was really laughing—about ‘conceptional pain.’ So there are deep psychological experts who discuss it, but scientifically I doubt.”
When I send Arabin an e-mail a year later to confirm her comments, she’s quick to modify them. “I become older and more cautious,” she writes. “Scientifically there is not (yet?) an explanation but God knows what might happen. … There is more than pure science between heaven and earth. Maybe the reasons that I myself chose to work with twins is because I was a member of an early twin—you never know.”
Twins researcher Nancy Segal, however, is unequivocally dismissive: “There’s no such thing as intrauterine knowledge of being a twin,” she tells me. “I think that’s just a misguided, romantic notion.”
Hillel Schwartz refers in his book to Plato’s Symposium on love, the philosophical dialogue that asserts that all human beings start as two: In it, Aristophanes gives a speech about how a double human was split by Zeus and doomed to seek his other half forever. “If it was true that initially all human beings were conceived as twins,” says Schwartz, “but only some were born as twins, then all these people that are called ‘singletons’ must go through life aching for that complete companionship of a twin. But at the same time, they go through life with a terrible guilt. Because one way or another they were responsible for devouring the other twin in the womb.”
If this premise were true—that we all start as twins but that most end up being born alone—I’m curious if Schwartz believes that the average person functions in the world as if he or she is missing a partner. “I don’t think that the average person would explain it to you that way,” he replies, “but if you would ask him what his ideals are for a partner, it always has to do with another half. Not someone diametrically different from you, but another half. This is probably not something people would have said in the sixteenth century; I think it’s a relatively new romantic notion that there is another half that will perfectly match you.”
Maybe that “romantic notion” of a perfect match is why I relate somewhat to the concept of a vanished twin. Robin is obviously (thank God) still around, but there’s a sense in which her uncoupling has felt like a kind of disappearance, leaving me with some of the same feelings that Hayton describes: longing, incompletion. Robin told me in our interview, “You feel a hole sometimes.” Maybe that gap is her: my “vanished” half.
David Teplica, a plastic surgeon in Chicago, is convinced that he lost his twin in utero. This became the genesis for an entire second career: He has spent twenty years photographing naked identical twins.
Teplica’s black-and-white pictures, some of which are in collections such as that of the Chicago Art Institute, and one of which is the cover image for Wally Lamb’s best-seller I Know This Much Is True, are unflinchingly close-up and intimate. The portraits feel more private than the typical side-by-side, ‘Gee, can you believe how much they look alike!’ twins photos.
One image shows two nude twin brothers, coiled around each other like they’re still in utero. Another shows two eleven-year-old girls’ faces—nose-to-nose, freckle-to-freckle; the sameness of their features is startling. Another is of two male twins biting parts of each other’s faces.
Teplica is an elegant, slim man—a towering six three and a half, with slicked-back silver hair and sizable sideburns. He lives with his partner, Kalev Peekna, in a fifteen-thousand-square-foot mansion with stained-glass windows, a castle incongruously situated among modest row houses in downtown Chicago. “I had been doing twin research as part of my plastic-surgery world for about four years,” Teplica explains as we settle ourselves into his attic studio. “And I was gravitating toward photographing twins pretty wildly. One day, the president of the foundation that was supporting my work”—the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth, run by Louis Keith—”came up to me and said, ‘So why are you so interested in this stuff?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you ask your mother why you’re so interested in twins?’ And I said, ‘I’m not going to ask my mother; that’s ridiculous.’ And he repeated, ‘Why don’t you go ask your mother?’
“So the next time Mom was in town, I asked her. And she turned white and said, ‘I never thought you’d hear this, but when I was pregnant with you, I was told that I was carrying twins. But then, in the fourth month, I started passing some clots and tissue, and in the end, only you were born.’ This was before ultrasound, so there was no way of confirming that I was part of a miscarried twin pair at that point, but she probably miscarried my other half.”
Teplica says this revelation filled in the blanks for him. “For a while I’d felt I was a freak, just obsessively diving into the twin issue. This validated things.”
Teplica says his twin identification has played out mostly in his photography. He says he asks himself, “Am I yearning for a relationship I had for the first four months of my gestation? I don’t know; I think that’s a little bit of a stretch. But maybe. In fact, we do know—Louis and his brother, Donald Keith, published a study about the vanished twin syndrome: Eighty-five percent of single-birth people like me, who align themselves with twins, are from pregnancies where there was heavy bleeding in the fourth month. That�
�s statistically significant. So it’s likely that there is some brain chemical or anatomy thing sensing a need for a relationship like that.” No such need has been scientifically established, but Teplica believes people who have lost a twin in utero feel incomplete in their adult life.
“I live it,” he replies.
A photo titled Ovum captures nude twin sisters who happen to be waitresses at Hooters. “They were nervous as hell at first.” Teplica smiles. “I said, ‘Ladies, I’m gay.’ They said, ‘We’re not worried about you. We don’t want to be naked in front of each other.’”
I don’t blame them. The thought of Robin and me naked and entwined together makes me flinch and blush. I can’t fathom a situation in which I would feel comfortable doing that. Of course, on occasion we still see each other’s bodies—in a clothing shop, for instance, if we’re sharing a dressing room. But I wouldn’t say our closeness translates to much physical interaction. It’s odd to think I’d be so shy in front of Robin.
I ask Teplica why he insists that his twin subjects be naked. “Oh my God!” Teplica exclaims, as if to say, How could it be more obvious? “All the barriers are gone. It’s like returning to the uterus. And the twins just relax. It might be awkward at first, but suddenly they cuddle, and do things they haven’t done in thirty years. Then I get very rich stuff. Giggling and biting and punching and hair pulling—I’ve seen it all. For instance, two straight guys, twenty-one years old, training as actors in London, ask me if they can please just suck each other’s thumbs because that’s what they did for the first five years of life. Society would think that they’re freaks, except that the photographs are lovely.”
Teplica says the twins who pose for him have a comfort level together that goes back to the womb. “You’re smashed against another living beast for nine months!” he exclaims. “It’s not like they’re floating around separately. There’s no extra space! They’re two tiny objects smashed against each other in one closed uterus. And the reason the uterus grows is because the smash becomes too tight, and it pushes the uterus out and stretches it over time. So for the entire pregnancy, these two little fetuses are cuddling. They’re kissing and stroking and touching and urinating and playing with each other’s faces and limbs and toes and holding hands. It all happens in there.”
The final photo we discuss, Reunion, is the one most viscerally moving to me: Two newborns are suckling each other’s noses. Teplica took the shot just minutes after the twins emerged from their mother; they’d been separated briefly for their newborn tests, then reunited in a bassinet. “I kind of postulated that they would recognize each other and instantly start clinging and coiling around each other,” Teplica says. “So I was hovering over the bassinet as they placed the two twins into it, and the very first thing that happened was that one twin stuck its fist down the mouth of the other twin. As a physician, I was so shocked and worried that he would be suffocated or something that I did not push the camera shutter, and instead lurched toward them to try to see if I could get the fist out. But instantly the twin pulled its fist out, and they recognized each other—by this act, apparently—and started suckling each other’s noses. So it’s clear there was this thing that used to happen in the uterus, where they would stick their fists into each other’s mouths and suckle each other’s noses. And they realized they were back, reconnected with each other after having that very painful and traumatic time during delivery where they were separated, and then they were very peaceful after they were rejoined.”
I ask how he felt personally—watching that. “It was pretty earth-shattering,” he admits. “It also helped me validate my own obsession with twins, right? If there is this bond that happens in the uterus, and I can prove it, then I’m not crazy for having these feelings. So on a personal level, it meant everything to me.”
Teplica’s Reunion photo brings to mind the biblical twins Jacob and Esau and their reunion in Genesis after decades apart. When Jacob sees that Esau is arriving with an army, he assumes it’s to exact revenge for his childhood theft of Esau’s blessing from their father, Isaac. But Esau embraces and kisses his brother instead, and maybe even nibbles him. Los Angeles rabbi David Wolpe explains the nibbling: “In the Hebrew, there are these dots over the word kissed, and nobody knows exactly why they are there, but the rabbis suggest that Esau bit him, that he didn’t just kiss him. He was aggressive.”
Not aggressive, maybe, but, rather, instinctively affectionate: the prenatal impulse of one twin to connect with the other after such a long time apart.
• •
When I interviewed Kollantai and Pector in Ghent, each emphasized how little emotional vocabulary exists in American society for handling twin loss. It struck me that the antithesis is the Yoruba tribe in southwestern Nigeria, which every twins expert knows well because the tribe has the highest rate of fraternal twin births in the world: forty in every thousand births, compared to twelve in a thousand in the United States. (There is no clear cause of the high twinning rate, though many believe that the species of yam they eat has properties that enhance fertility.) Because there are so many twin births, and often twins are premature and underweight, there are inevitably frequent twin deaths; the Yoruba honor the dead twin with a statue called ibeji (“twins”), a carved wooden figure that the parents commission from a local artisan and which they honor and cherish, even going so far as to bathe, dress, and feed the statuette. The ibejis are not meant to be likenesses of the deceased newborns, but to represent their souls; the soul in the figurine is supposed to balance the soul of the living twin, which is considered in jeopardy.
“If one twin dies,” explains Nike S. Lawal, professor in Harvard’s Department of African and African American Studies, “parents have to do something for the remaining twin, some ritual so the one who died won’t try to take the other twin along.”
Every year, Yoruba mothers dance with their wooden twin effigies, singing songs they often write themselves. In an art book of ibeji photographs by George Chemeche, one of these songs is excerpted: “Twins-child, please do not leave me/Twins, please don’t go away and leave me.”
Dr. Louis Keith says that he and Donald do think ahead to the time when one may lose the other. “Of course it won’t be easy,” Louis says matter-of-factly. “I went to a funeral of a twin who was killed in a terrible accident. It was a Jewish funeral, and as they were getting ready to lower the body into the ground, the surviving twin started talking to his brother through the wall of the coffin. I was watching this very closely, because I knew I was able to see into it in a way that other people couldn’t. I was thinking to myself, If my brother dies before me, I will only lose his physical body, because I will continue to talk to him. In the coffin, in the shower, wherever.”
Donald agrees: “Our conversation started a long time ago,” he says. “And it won’t end when one of us is gone.”
ABIGAIL: Who is more brave?
ROBIN: I guess me.
ABIGAIL: More private?
ROBIN: Me.
ABIGAIL: More hardworking?
ROBIN: Totally equal.
ABIGAIL: Body-conscious?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Athletic?
ROBIN: Equal.
ABIGAIL: More sensitive?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Emotional?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Sentimental?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Social?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Argumentative?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Political?
ROBIN: Equal.
ABIGAIL: Creative?
ROBIN: Equal.
ABIGAIL: Eager to please?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Superstitious?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Religious?
ROBIN: You.
ABIGAIL: Spiritual?
ROBIN: Me.
ABIGAIL: Generous?
ROBIN: I guess, you.
ABIGAIL: Ambitious?
ROBIN: Equal.
ABIGAIL: Impatient?
ROBIN: You. I’ve been working on it.
ABIGAIL: Shy?
ROBIN: Me.
ABIGAIL: Maternal?
ROBIN: Equal.
ABIGAIL: Who needs the other one more?
ROBIN: I guess you. But you don’t know what’s going on inside me.
ABIGAIL: Why don’t you tell me?
ROBIN: Because if I needed you, I would tell you.
• •
9 SPLITTING THE DIFFERENCE:
WHEN IDENTICAL TWINS DIFFER
The study of twins is about the best natural experiment that we have in any aspect of human physiology or behaviour. If one is interested in the question of how important genes and environment are, you look at identical twins.
—Dr. Nick Martin, lab head of genetic epidemiology, Queensland Institute of Medical Research
In June 2008, a cheeky, athletic twenty-year-old twin from Gloucester, England, named Emily Blunt learned she had a rare bone cancer. Her identical sister, Kath, did not. One month later, Emily was dead. When the press first published her grim diagnosis, her twin, Kath, was quoted as saying, “I just feel so guilty. … We have always fought each other’s battles—but this is one fight I cannot win for her. It leaves me thinking, ‘Why did it happen to her and not me instead?’”
Why indeed?
One identical twin gets cancer and the other doesn’t.
One gets Alzheimer’s; the other doesn’t.
One has schizophrenia; the other doesn’t.
Same DNA. Different fates.
Twins provide the perfect storm to study disease because their identicalness highlights any difference. What “goes awry” in one case and not another?
Kathy Giusti, fifty when we speak, is an attractive Harvard Business School graduate with two school-age children. She used to be an executive at a pharmaceutical company, but now she is living with multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer that afflicts fifty thousand Americans and which few survive. Her identical twin, Karen, a former attorney for Time magazine, doesn’t have it. Since Kathy’s diagnosis in 1996, she’s become nationally renowned for creating a nonprofit organization that funds groundbreaking research. The Multiple Myeloma Foundation has raised $105 million and launched four FDA-approved drugs on the market in the last four years.
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