What Happens When One Twin Dies?
In Dying City, we meet a surviving twin, Peter, who’s lost his identical brother a year prior, and is in the throes of a complex grieving process. As Playwright Christopher Shinn notes, “I always wanted it to be twins. I think because it’s theatrical, it’s exciting.” The following is comprised of excerpts from research on twin death by Rebecca Withrow and Valerie Schwiebert published in the Harvard University Journal for Counseling and Development. Fascination with the twin bond has gripped cultures all over the world for millennia. Although only approximately 3% of the total general population are twins, those who are twins have imbued twin relationships with expectations of extreme closeness, magical understanding, private languages, individual’s fantasies of having another self. In 2000, the number of surviving individuals resulting from multiple births was 125 million worldwide. Equal fascination with the severing of this mystically strong bond seems like a foregone conclusion. Yet
