It’s been a very long year since a violent tragedy took my twin sister and her daughter from our family. When I tell people I lost my identical twin sister and niece, they immediately assume death. Curiously, I allow them to think this because it’s easier to consider them dead than to realize the real tragedy is the mental illness that has been kept secret for most of our fifty years. Unfortunately in that December dawn of 2010, reality was no longer a luxury to keep at a distance. The “come to Jesus” moment had arrived and the events that transpired over the next twenty-four will forever remain as a mix of disbelief, fear and ultimately sorrow.
One year later and as the pain and grief subsides I’m left with questions I’ll never get the answers too and so much doubt. What remains now is a shell of memories that I wrestle with from time to time, wondering if they are real or a mere fabrication of my own desire to believe that the relationship I truly had with my twin sister of fifty years was based on love, instead of just a great actress playing a role.
Two paragraphs into this and I still can’t bring myself to type the words you all want to see right now … what happened, where did she go and what does she suffer from? Ahhh the stigma of mental illness, no matter how evolved, how grounded we think we are, it’s still hard to grapple with, particularly when it hits so close to home. A year of therapy and I’m still haunted by the diagnosis. So what is it you ask? My twin sister is what the psychiatric world declares a “sociopath” with tendencies towards a narcissistic rage. Wow if I was playing “Words with Friends” right now I could score big time. Weird how I still find my humor in all of this. Of course my twin sister has never received medical attention for what my therapist by all accounting of the facts and events diagnosed as sociopathy. I’ve learned over the past year through support groups and others who have come face to face with loved ones suffering; sociopaths, particularly narcissists rarely if ever seek help. Everything I’ve read about narcissists and sociopaths seems to validate my fears and there was never love; she is just a good actress playing a role.
What set her off that day a year ago is really just the climax to a decade or two of downward spiral. As close as my sisters and I seemed, it was always odd that my twin had such a different memory of growing up in our home. While my two older sisters and I reminiscent with mostly affection about our years growing up, she always seemed to have some odd remembrance. We used to joke that she didn’t grow up in our house. All joking aside, that was our first clue to the depth of her mental illness. She didn’t operate in the same reality as we did. Her world was as she dictated and fabricated. We didn’t have a perfect childhood but we had two loving parents who worked hard to provide for us. We had our share of drama but what household full of girls doesn’t? That night in December was supposed to be a night of reconnecting with a niece we had been denied access to because my twin and I had an argument and instead of working through it like adults, she declared me “dead” to her. This was typical of her behavior. Our middle sister was relegated to the depths of hell a decade earlier, a letter out of the blue declared her dead to my twin and we never knew why. My niece was seven when we last shared time together. Five years later and she was now a beautiful twelve year old with an edge and also suspicion.
