The Lost Twin

A short story by Martin Christen

With a group of friends who, together, ran seminars on personal development and gender issues, we were talking one day about how we would like to attend a seminar ourselves for once, and do something for ourselves. The idea developed to go. as a whole group, to a seminar led by Angelika Kern. A seminar house was rented somewhere in the canton of Schaffhausen, Ms Kern agreed to act as our facilitator, and soon we set off for a special weekend. This must have been in 2001. When Ms Kern introduced herself at the beginning, she explained that she worked with two methods: family constellation work and craniosacral therapy. Each of us would take turns receiving a session using one of the two methods. Which method would be used in each case would be decided together, by feel. The other participants would be present throughout, witnessing each interaction. There were about twenty of us – some couples, some individuals – and we had known each other for years and were good friends. This approach could easily fill an entire weekend, and promised to bring us even closer together as a group.

It would be fascinating to report on my friends’ sessions, but then we would never reach the end. This is about me. When my turn came, I sat down next to Ms Kern so we could get acquainted and decide on the form of therapy. She fairly quickly suggested craniosacral therapy for me. She had been doing family constellation work with the previous people, so this was something entirely new and interesting. She explained the procedure as follows: I would lie down on a treatment table and relax on my back. She would sit on a chair at my head end and place her hands on my shoulders. She would then sense her way into my body with her hands and arms. I should feel free to describe at any time how I was feeling. I objected that I sometimes found it difficult to name my feelings and talk about them, but that I could easily describe my physical sensations. She laughed and said that was no problem – I should simply stick to my physical sensations. How things would develop from there would unfold by itself.

So I lay down on the table, and she placed her hands on my shoulders. She continued to explain – addressing both my friends sitting around us and me – that she was now sensing her way into my body step by step, slowly penetrating deeper and deeper. She gave a running commentary on how well things were progressing, and I reported whether I felt warm or cold in the relevant parts of my body, whether there was a bout of sweating, whether I was trembling, or whatever else was happening. At some point, she said she could feel a particular resistance. Was I ready for an experiment? I said yes. She suggested a sentence that I should repeat silently to myself several times, simply observing whether it produced any reaction or not. The sentence was: «Better you than me.» Right, so I repeated the sentence to myself several times, but didn’t have the impression of any particular reaction, and I said so. No problem, she said – then let’s simply turn the sentence around: «Better me than you.» I turned this sentence over and over in my mind – and, wow! I took off like a rocket. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, but I was suddenly seized by an overwhelming grief. I began to weep, tears running down my cheeks, I cried out and writhed on the table. «Better me than you!» The sentence felt simultaneously terrible and absolutely true. A deep truth that touched my innermost being. The sentence tore me apart. Of course! It was logical! If someone had to suffer, then it should be me – not my neighbour, not my fellow man, not my loved ones, not anyone else – me! And I could not bear this realisation. Suddenly, years of grief poured out of me with a force I could never have imagined.

Ms Kern now explained – speaking almost more to my friends than to me, though of course I heard every word – that she had sensed this. It is, she said, far more common than people generally believe that a pregnancy is, right at the beginning, a twin pregnancy, but that one of the two twins quietly disappears, more or less without trace. Sometimes there is a small bleed in the early weeks of pregnancy, sometimes it causes more disruption such as cramps, and in rare cases the doctor discovers a dead foetus and has to remove it surgically. The expectant mother may not even be aware of the premature loss of the twin foetus. But in every case, this situation is traumatic for the surviving foetus. Medically, there are demonstrably increased risks of cerebral palsy or heart defects. But from a psychological perspective too, significant long-term consequences are to be expected. As could be seen in my case, she said, I was blaming myself for the death of my twin brother. Or to put it the other way around: the death of my twin brother had disturbed me so deeply that I would rather have died in his place, and thus spared him his suffering.

All of this made a great deal of sense to me. I understood exactly what she was talking about, and how it applied to me. I had, after all, repeatedly suffered severe depressive episodes in recent years – episodes in which I withdrew completely from the world, literally pulled the covers over my head, and felt that I didn’t belong in this world, that I shouldn’t really be here, that my presence, my life, was a mistake.

A twin brother! I was supposed to have had a twin brother! This realisation felt wonderful. I had always wished for a brother like that. I could vividly imagine growing up with my twin brother and sharing life with him. Having someone who simply knows everything about me and understands me unconditionally, because we are twin brothers. I drove home from the seminar in a state of elation. This realisation was something I could work with. I began to talk to my twin brother, to explain to him why I did what I did, why I felt what I felt. I tried to think of a name for him, but couldn’t settle on anything. That was logical too, since a name is chosen by the parents, not by the brother. And I slowly came to understand the longing I had always felt within me – that something important was missing from my life, something irretrievably lost. That unbridled melancholy that seized me and brought me to my knees again and again.

A few weeks later, I told my sister about it – about the seminar and the important things I had experienced and discovered there. It was over an internet chat, because she lived quite far away and we rarely made the long journey to see each other. She listened to everything attentively, and at the end said that yes, it would certainly be interesting to know whether anything unusual had happened during my mother’s early pregnancy. I should probably talk to my father about it, she suggested – our mother had passed away a few years earlier and could no longer be asked.

A few more weeks later, when we were chatting again, she asked whether I had spoken to my father yet about this twin brother story and my mother’s early pregnancy. I said no, I hadn’t had the opportunity, but it seemed she herself knew something. Couldn’t she just tell me? Not really, she said cautiously – but she could point me in the right direction. For the details, I should please ask our father. So?

So: she happened to know how my conception had come about. It was during the winter sports holiday of 1962, when the whole family – my parents and my three siblings – had been on a skiing holiday in Lenk. My parents had been particularly happy and in love, she knew this because they had been almost unreachable, entirely absorbed in each other, with no time for the children. These children were at that time 8, 9 and 12 years old – my sister the eldest, the two younger boys – and old enough to entertain themselves, so it hadn’t been a problem.

A few weeks later, back home, my mother had been deeply distressed and had fallen into a real depression. She had discovered she was pregnant, and did not want another child at all. For one thing, she was already 42 and felt too old for another child; for another, she complained that the whole circus was starting all over again. She had only just got through the worst of it with the other three – and now start again from the beginning? The same thing all over again? The depression became so severe that she made a suicide attempt. This went wrong, however, and didn’t even have any consequences for the pregnancy, so that in the end, in October, a healthy boy came into the world – namely, yours truly.

I beg your pardon? I could hardly believe what I had heard. My mother had made a suicide attempt? While she was pregnant with me? Wow! That cast the sentence «Better me than you!» in an entirely new light. Perhaps there was no twin brother whose suffering I had wanted to take on – perhaps in the end it was my mother’s suffering that pained me so deeply that I would rather have died myself than cause my mother unhappiness. If my mother was suffering so much because of me that she wanted to die, then surely it would be better to die oneself, and in doing so, end my mother’s suffering. Better not to come into the world at all. Better me than you! Looked at this way, the sentence suddenly made even more sense.

I now wanted to know more about this. I let a little time pass, but then sought out my father and raised it with him. He was reluctant to open up for a long time, hedged, talked about how yes, the depression was true, and that he had decided at the time to give me particular attention in order to take the burden off my mother. He wanted to take special care of me, consciously more than he had with the other three. And it’s true – I remember many trips with my father, the two of us travelling for hours by train across Switzerland, where he showed me all manner of sights, natural wonders, and special museums. As far as I can remember, these trips happened mainly during my primary school years. And later too, he introduced me to the world of technology and engineering – he was an electrical engineer by profession – but also talked a great deal about politics and religion. The latter in a way that I found particularly fascinating and undogmatic. Although a member of the Reformed Church, he could speak at length about reincarnation, spiritual worlds, and angelic beings, and was in many respects at odds with the official Reformed teaching – as I later discovered through various confrontations with the village pastor.

I kept pressing him about how the suicide attempt had actually happened. As I said, he resisted for a long time, and I could see why. He was afraid I might come to hate my mother because of it, and that this would, as he put it, do me more harm than good. I reassured him and said that too much water had already flowed down the Aare, that I was now grown up and mature enough to keep these things in perspective. I was convinced that my mother had done everything humanly possible in her life, and sometimes even more than that. I had the greatest respect for her. But this point mattered to me, and I simply wanted the truth to be on the table, so that my soul could find peace. At that, he relented and told me the following:

One day, in her despair, she had gone down to the garage, got into the car, and run the engine with the garage door closed. She wanted to suffocate herself with the toxic exhaust fumes. This takes a certain amount of time, and suddenly she apparently changed her mind about dying. In any case, she suddenly cried out for help. He himself had been upstairs in the house and heard these cries. He rushed down to the garage, opened the garage door, manoeuvred his half-unconscious wife into the passenger seat, and drove her to the nearest cantonal hospital. In this way, both she and the child within her – that is, I – could be saved. After that, it was never spoken of again; she came to terms with the pregnancy, and in time was able to develop love for the child.

That, then, is the story of the pregnancy that brought me into this world. To this day, I still go through depressive phases in which I think that I shouldn’t really be in this world at all, that I am out of place, a disruptive factor. At least, since I became aware of the cause of these thoughts, these phases have become less frequent. My psychologist recently told me that it is time for me to let go of my victim role. In the light of this story, I find that difficult. But he is certainly right. Who knows – perhaps one day I will be able to lay the sentence «Better me than you!» to rest, once and for all.