73-YO Identical Twins Wind Up Not Being Able To Live Without Each Other

http://www.pantagraph.com/news/weird-news/twins-found-dead-in-their-calif-home/article_4087ea04-6867-11e1-9c34-0019bb2963f4.html

These two women had such a bond that this appears to be the way they went. I have heard of such things with couples who were married for years and died within days of each other, but never, that I had heard of, had seen stories about siblings.

RIP.

 

Sad story. My wife is a twin, and those two have a bond that I'll never understand or fully appreciate. She had a difficult time adjusting to living two hours away from her twin -- if suddenly one of them passed away I can't imagine how the other would react.

We all have siblings, but I'm constantly reminded that unless you're a twin, there are certain things you just can't understand.

 

Only child, checking in. 8)

I read about this earlier today. What a strange story. They seemed to have little to no contact with the outside world in recent decades.

 

Touche.

 

My sister has 6-year old identical daughters, and they are amazing.

Sis and her hubby have usually dressed them separately, brushed their hair a little differently, but left to their own devices, they'll dress up as Twinsie-Winsies and do their hair up the same.

For a while, Sis and BIL made sure to buy them different clothes, but now they are old enough to care what they wear, now they ask for the same stuff a lot of the time. Sometimes Sis will say, "you're driving me nuts, one of you change socks or something," and they'll say, "awwww Mom, you always let HER wear the stuff she wants."

So finally Sis said, "the hell with it, if they want to wear the same things, as long as it's not all the time, I'm not gonna battle about it."

When they do that, I can't tell 'em apart. But I only see them once a month or so. My sister says, "I can tell, but I have to look close."

Their school has uniforms so they are gonna have to dress more or less alike to SOME extent whether Mom and Dad like it or not, although the principal has said to my sister there may be some "exemptions" made to the dress code "for the sake of the teachers' sanity."

They don't usually do the one-starts-the-other-one-finishes-sentences thing, but they CAN. Sometimes they do it to freak people out (it works).

In the last couple of years, as they've become more and more self-aware, they are really learning to play off of it. For a while, until they were 4 or so, they would just call each other "Sister," and my sis was worried maybe they were having some social adjustment problems (difficulty with self-differentiation), so they consulted a specialist.

The specialist came back, "They know exactly what they're doing. To put it in adult terms, they're screwing with you." My sis and her hubby sat down and said, "Girls, we think you should call each other by name," and they said, "Oh, OK, we just thought you liked it when we said 'sister.' "

The specialist also said, "The identical twins who seem to have adjustment problems are the ones whose parents make a real big deal about it one way or the other -- either insisting they always dress the same, or that they NEVER do."

They still do the "Sister" bit once in a while because they know it freaks everybody else out. They are zooming through kindergarten at warp speed (already in 3rd/4th grade reading levels) so there's no worry on other academic fronts (their older brother and sister are in honors classes too. Meanwhile their 3-year-old baby sister won't watch Barney because "he's just too dumb").

Their kindergarten class is kind of small (about 16-18 kids, IIRC) but apparently they're having no problem making friends -- they don't just sit staring at each other all day. Apparently as a unit they take the lead in a lot of the playtime activities and the rest of the group joins in. When they get into grade school next year, they'll probably be in separate classrooms.

They're both "juniors" -- R. has my sister's name (handed down from my mother, who got it from her grandmother) while A. is the female version of her dad's name. They have distinct, but not clashing, personalities -- A. is more serious and disciplined, while R. is a bit more 'artistic' and expressive.

They're old enough they kind of understand the whole twin thing. It'll be interesting to see what happens when they get older. (They kind of slightly resemble Lindsay Lohan in "The Parent Trap" -- hopefully the resemblance will be visual and not behavioral.)

Seeing how they relate, I guess I can understand the women in the story.

But I certainly hope my nieces develop separate lives in their own right. My siblings and I are close (although none of us are twins), but we all live in separate cities, and I certainly hope when I go (as the oldest, I'll probably go first) they'll still have plenty of reason to go on.

 

That is awesome, starman.

 

Just one point...they went to a doctor first before asking their kids why they call each other "Sister" when all they would have had to do was ask the kids why they did that?

 

Well, I'm not in on the day-to-day updates so I don't know the exact sequence of events as to whose idea it was to call the specialist, or when .

I get this stuff a couple weeks after the fact, in the end what I got was the specialist concluded the kids had no problem differentiating their own identity from their twin's.

 

I went to school from grades 1-12 with a pair of twins (who were smoking hot, BTW) who regularly switched classrooms without the teachers noticing which one was actually sitting in on their class.

My aunts are identical twins, but having known them all my life I (and the rest of my family) can usually tell them apart. Every once in a while someone will call one by the other's name.

Both the twins I went to school with and my aunts are all very social people who each lead their own lives, though they are all very close with their sister. None of them are as creepily reclusive as the twins in this story.

 

FWIW Starman, I wasn't being critical...just came across odd to me.

Also, my mother-in-law is a twin and my ex-fiancee ended up giving birth to twins...so I wasn't trying to make a dig.

 

Nah, I didn't take it badly. In fact, my sis said herself, "we never really asked them to stop."

It was just that for a while, they referred to each other as "Sister" ALL THE TIME, and mom and dad were getting a bit worried they thought that was their NAMES.

Turns out as the specialist reported, they knew dang well what their names were, they were just messing with the adults in the room.