LIVING FOR TWO - just the beginning!
The grief of my triplet sister who died at birth led me to interview lone twins all over the world and write a book. I thought my grieving work was over there, at least the part I was going to share in book form. I thought that now I had told everything there was to tell. But it turned out that Living for two was only the beginning of what would happen next. I am writing these lines because I want to tell you about how my contact with my sister Maria then continued.
It is something that has become clear when I have met other lone twins, that on some level they still have some kind of connection with their other half. Not infrequently it is guiding, and comes with strength to the one left behind.
Since I am a triplet and have a living sister left in my life, I probably also thought a lot that my story was not that important. I had the love left in my living sister. Maybe that's why the chapter about me was the most difficult to write in Living for two. There was so much unprocessed within me.
Every now and then I have woken up with Maria's guiding words in my ears. Not very often, but sometimes it has happened, so often that it has become everyday for me. Small guiding words that have helped me in various important events in life. In December 2023, Maria's voice was there again one morning. This time she said, "Follow my voice, be my voice." I have worked as a journalist all my professional life but a year ago crashed straight into exhaustion. Therefore, I had not written anything for the past few months when this happened. In January I sat down in front of my computer in my home office. I had decided to see if I could connect with my sister. And she started speaking through what I wrote. Throughout the spring, we met a few days a week. It was an absolutely fantastic feeling. She was really there, my whole writing room was filled with such joy and lightness. It started with me writing a few opening lines about what I wanted to talk about for the day. She answered in a quick flow and I really had to be completely here and now to keep up with what she was answering me. Already in the first chapter, she promised me that together we would write a book about life on earth, because twins have such a strong bond, we would tell about a love that is stronger than death. I can promise that as a journalist I was skeptical, was it even possible? And as an author, to write a book without a synopsis, without planning the slightest. How would this go? And what I worried about the most was, would Maria really be with me on the trip. Did I imagine it all? I understand that it is not obvious to everyone that you can do this, get in touch with someone who has left life in a joint writing. And as I told you, I was also doubtful. But every day Maria was really there. The first half of the book was me opening each chapter, but then she took over and then the tone changed. She challenged me to write about things that were more sensitive. For the last chapters of the book, she was no longer with me in the writing room. But it is as it should be. I live here on earth and she is in another dimension. But her voice lives on in me. That is what our conversation wants to tell. And the months she was actually in my writing room were amazing. There were times when she physically got into what I was writing. She could erase a sentence or cross out a few words. One morning I got the name of a writer who wrote a lot about death, Elisabeth Kübler Ross. I had not heard of her before, but I understood that it was Maria who wanted to help me further in the book. That it really was Maria who was behind it, I understood even more when it turned out that Elisabeth Kübler Ross was born as triplets!
In what we wrote, Maria gave life advice. Seen from her perspective, a bit from above, she had the ability to see what we who live here on earth cannot always see. We talked about grief, about how it has many faces, about how grief counts but most of all we talked about the strength of having once been one and the knowledge of oneness that all of us twins carry with us. I especially remember how she asked me to dance more, laugh more and marvel more at life.
After forty-two chapters, the book felt finished. Now I have sent it to various publishers here in Sweden and hope that it will reach a larger readership. What I want to say is first and foremost. We can have a relationship between the worlds. We are not alone. There is wisdom in having an ally in another dimension. The book has the working title "Where the souls dance". And when I painted a picture this summer, the image of two dancing sisters came to me as a motif. I end with some of Maria's comforting words to me in the book, connected to our dance in the womb:
In the dance at the beginning of life there was much joy. When everything is coordinated in community, it creates happiness. Community just to be happy to be able to move, to be able to feel the energy of life through one's body together with another being who is obediently there and makes the joy double. Or triple, or rather multiplies it. The joy of being together cannot be put into words. The dance and the energy it generates cannot be measured. What you remember, and which has always remained in you like a warm blanket around your shoulders, no one can ever take away from you. That love, that source, is so strong that you can draw new energy from it, again and again and again.
(Published in LTN (Lone Twin Network) Newsletter November 2024.)