PARIS – It has been more than four years since Caryl McIntire Edwards lost her twin brother to a heart attack, but she still uses the present tense when she talks about him, as if he might be in the room next door.
“They say you should say, I am a twin, never I was a twin,'” she said during a conversation in February. For twin siblings, she said, a bond that begins developing at inception is nearly impossible to untie.
It’s this bond that McIntire Edwards has struggled to understand and explain since the loss of Robert Bruce McIntire on Dec. 5, 1999. In fact, she said, she wasn’t fully aware of the extent of her own grief until meeting other twins who had lost siblings, through the New England chapter of an organization called Twinless Twins Inc.
“It was a wonderful, wonderful connecting time for me, to just realize I wasn’t alone,” she said of her first support group meeting in West Boylston, Mass., in December.
Since that meeting, McIntire Edwards has decided she’d like to share her story with other twinless twins, and possibly start a more accessible chapter of the organization here in Maine.
Amy Paro McDonald is the New England regional director of Twinless Twins. There are approximately 1,300 members of the organization nationally, she said in an April 9 e-mail. “In New England I have roughly 75 official members, 10 of which are from Maine,” McDonald wrote. “These numbers do not accurately depict the number of twinless twins in our area.”
While McDonald wasn’t sure how many twinless twins live in New England, she said at least one set of twins is born for every 90 to 100 births. “Now think – at some point in their lives, almost one half will be twinless,” she said.
McDonald herself lost her twin sister, Mandy, Feb. 7, 2003. She was killed in a car accident in New Hampshire when they were 22. “It doesn’t get better,” McDonald said. “You just learn to deal with it better.”
The hardest times have been those like her wedding day, or when she realized she was going to have a child. The grief at such times is stronger for twins than it is for most people, McDonald said. Birthdays are hard because, she said, because, “We shared a birthday cake.”
Birthdays are hard for Caryl McIntire Edwards, as well, but she has learned to cope. Each year on that day, Aug. 12, she visits her brother’s grave in York, the community where they both grew up and where “Bobby,” as she calls him, stayed.
It’s not a visit to mourn his death so much as a way to celebrate their connection, McIntire Edwards said. This year they will be 60, and McIntire Edwards will visit his grave and look down over the engraved stone she has placed beneath his headstone.
It reads:
“No farewell works were spoken,
No time to say goodbye,
You were gone before we knew it,
And only God knows why.”
McIntire Edwards said she was estranged from her brother at the time of his death, but she dreamed of his passing two months before he died. The grief, she said, “goes on forever.” Reaching out to others through Twinless Twins has proven therapeutic, however, and she hopes to be in contact with more twins this spring.
For more information on Twinless Twins, McIntire Edwards may be reached at 743-6290. McDonald may be reached at [email protected], and the Twinless Twins Web site may be found at www.twinlesstwins.org.
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