WINTER/SPRING 2018 THERE’S NO GRIEF SO RAW AS LOSING YOUR TWIN
Astonishingly, half of those who lose an identical twin die within two years. In this hauntingly powerful account, an award-winning photographer tells why...
IN 1987, the identical twin brother of award-winning food photographer David Loftus died, aged 24, following a fatally miscalculated injection in hospital. Since then, David has been tormented by grief and guilt. So last year, more than 30 years on, he began a diary in which he records both their cherished childhood memories and the pain and regret he has suffered since John died. This exclusive extract from his book, The Diary Of A Lone Twin, tells a poignant and powerful story of love, loss and recovery.
LoNELINESS is a feeling different from ‘ being alone’. one can be alone and completely at peace but you can feel lonely even when others are around. When my identical twin brother John died in 1987, at the age of 24, I was in a relationship, I had my mother, my siblings and my friends, but overnight I became in my mind the loneliest man on earth.
I feel it so much less now but it still sneaks up on me sometimes, as it did on a photo shoot at Jamie oliver’s house in Essex last year.
over the past 20 years we’ve done a lot of work together but my diary recalls my sadness during what should have been an enjoyable shoot.
‘ultimately it was a long, hot, hard day, with some beautiful and inspiring food, glorious scenery in the fields and gardens of Saffron Walden, and hundreds of photos taken.
‘We were surrounded by black swans and their cygnets, tufted ducks and their ducklings, peacocks and woodpeckers. But it was also a day of being surrounded by people, some of whom I know very well, but feeling utterly and desperately alone.’
That entry comes from the daily journal I kept in 2018, from January 1 to November 11, the year after the 30th anniversary of John’s death. Thirty years of surviving as a singleton after spending nearly half my life as an identical twin.
In recording my feelings, I was fuelled — even so long after his death — by a deep sense of injustice and festering guilt about what happened to John. But I also wanted to show the ultimately positive me that lives and breathes today.
of course, feelings of mourning and loss can still knock me over, like every seventh wave among incoming breakers, but now I just ride them a little better and a little longer.
In that respect, I am a success story, thanks largely to my best chum Tim, who as a 14-year- old survived an explosion which killed his identical twin Nick.
We were introduced by the late Dr Elizabeth Bryan, a pioneer in the field of twin studies who knew that half of those who lose their identical twin die within two years. Tragically this statistic was borne out when another lone twin I tried to help at Dr Bryan’s suggestion took their own life just before our first meeting date. I knew that even one less death in the world would make publishing my story worthwhile, but sometimes I wondered whether I could continue exploring the loss, just as I have been unable to wet- shave myself since shaving John in hospital.
The contours of his face became so familiar to me that I am haunted whenever I see my own reflection and the feeling I had on day one of completing my journal was of facing a very large, very clear mirror, for the first time since his death.
So much in a photographer’s career relies on those around them and a highlight of this part of the year was working with Prue Leith on her new book. Like her, the days were filled with colour and vivacity and this reminded me why I turned to photography after John died, swapping the solitary drawing board of the illustrator for the company of strangers circled behind a photographer’s back and watching one’s every move.
John was an illustrator, too, and for those who have lived and worked together, as we did, the death of a twin can leave the surviving sibling feeling so utterly bereft as to doubt whether they can ever function as a complete person.
mostly I have always felt a half person, walking in the shadow of my lost twin, and there was one occasion, shortly after he died, when I felt that I might have sensed his presence. That was in a church in the Lake District where the two of us had spent much time in our youth.
Needing some time away from the friends I was on holiday with, I was sitting alone in the front pew when I felt a hand on either shoulder. Every hair on my body stood on end and I shivered violently. The pressure remained only for seconds but what initially felt so cold and terrifying ultimately became warm and comforting.
I wonder now whether emotional tiredness conjured up this mythical moment but I don’t think so and neither can I explain why, after John died, I began waking with a jolt at 1.25am, confused and disorientated.
my mother later told me that this was the time of John’s birth with me arriving ten minutes later.
When we were in our cot, he used to hold on to my face with both hands, so tight that he drew blood. Apparently I didn’t reciprocate but neither did I cry. I accepted his hold on me and I still have those crescentshaped scars of babyhood today, one of my few tangible legacies of John.
We grew up in carshalton, Surrey, the eldest of our parents’ four children. I have many memories of us running, charging, chasing, flying through the air on our wooden ‘shuggy boat’ — a swing Father built that could seat the four of us.
It was a beautiful soft blue and would swing so high from the old plum tree at the bottom of the garden that I’m sure the childhood shrieks could be heard for miles. our mother was a GP and our father, who died a few years before John, was a stockbroker, beautifully