My name is Laurence Griswold. I am seventy-two years old, a retired land surveyor, and I live in Syracuse, New York, where I have lived all my life apart from two years courtesy of the United States Army.

I am an identical twin. My brother Jerome was born ten minutes before me on the fourteenth of March, 1927, and he reminded me of those ten minutes for the next seventy-one years. For fifty-eight of them, from the summer of 1940 until the week he died, he and I played eighteen holes of golf together at the same municipal course every Saturday it was open, which in Syracuse is a good many Saturdays fewer than one would like.

Jerome died of a heart attack on Wednesday, the fourteenth of October, 1998. We had played the previous Saturday. He shot 91. I shot 94. I have not been allowed to forget it, even now.

A young woman at the public library helped me set up this page. I wrote it for myself, I suppose, but mostly for the other twins who have lost their twin and have found, as I have, that the world does not entirely understand what that means. If you are one of them, you are welcome here.

Who Jerome Was

He was the louder one. People who could not tell us apart by sight, which was nearly everyone outside our own house, learned to tell us apart by ear: if one of the Griswold boys was laughing at his own joke, that was Jerome. He sang in the Methodist choir for forty years with a baritone that was more enthusiastic than accurate. He could not pass a dog without speaking to it. He was a terrible loser at golf and a worse winner.

We were drafted together in the summer of 1945, the war in Europe already over and the one in the Pacific ending while we were in basic training, and the Army, in a rare fit of good sense, kept us together. We spent 1946 and 1947 in the same engineer company in occupied Germany, where a sergeant from Ohio taught us to run a transit and a level, and we discovered we liked nothing better than measuring the world. We came home, went to school on the GI Bill, and in 1955 hung out a shingle: Griswold Brothers, Land Surveyors. For thirty years we walked the fields and woods and back lots of Onondaga County together, one of us on the instrument and the other on the rod, and if I may say so, a good many property lines in this county are where they are because two men who looked exactly alike agreed on them.

He married Donna in 1951. I married Miriam in 1952, and he was my best man, and I was his. He had three children and seven grandchildren and he knew every one of their birthdays without writing them down, which I never managed with my own.

He telephoned me every morning at seven o'clock for forty-three years. There was rarely anything to say. He said it anyway.

What a Twin Is

People who are not twins ask me what it was like, and I have never found a good answer, because I have nothing to compare it to. I have never been anything else. But I can tell you a few things.

We finished each other's sentences. This is not a figure of speech. We did it so often that Miriam and Donna gave up remarking on it in about 1953.

For most of our lives we were spoken of as one person. "The Griswold boys." "The twins." Our mother called us "Jerry-and-Larry" as a single word until the day she died, and I answered to it. Teachers, sergeants, clients and the man at the hardware store mostly didn't bother to sort out which of us was which. We didn't mind. We rather liked it.

And now here is a thing I didn't expect. People still call me Jerry. At the grocery store, at the bank, after church. Acquaintances who haven't heard, or who have heard and forgotten, or who simply see a tall old man with the Griswold face and pick a name. "Morning, Jerry." I used to correct them with a laugh. Now I don't always correct them. Sometimes I just say good morning. I can't explain why.

Losing One

I have buried my parents, and good friends, and a great many acquaintances; at my age one goes to a good many funerals. I knew what grief was, or thought I did. This is different.

When Jerome died I lost my brother, and my business partner of thirty years, and my Saturday game, and the seven o'clock telephone call. But I also lost the person I had been measured against, and measured with, since before either of us drew breath. I don't know how else to put it. For seventy-one years there was a man in the world with my face, who remembered everything I remembered, who knew what I was about to say. Then there was not.

For a long while I couldn't look at myself in the shaving mirror. It was his face, you see.

People meant well. "At least you had him for seventy-one years." That is true, and I am grateful, and it does not help in the slightest. You do not miss a thing less because you had it longer. You miss it more.

I have since learned, from other twins, that a great deal of what I felt is common among us: the feeling of being half of something, the guilt of being the one left, the strange business with mirrors and names. I wish I had known that sooner. It would not have made it hurt less. It would have made it less lonely.

What Has Helped

Saturdays. For three weeks after the funeral I didn't go near the course. On the fourth Saturday Miriam handed me my clubs at the back door and locked it behind me. The starter, who has known us for thirty years, didn't say a word. He simply put me in with a threesome who had an open spot, three men I knew only to nod to: Paul Escamilla, a retired mail carrier; Cletus Seawright, who used to own the Esso station on the corner; and Richard Holt, who is my age and has, it turns out, the worst slice in central New York. Their fourth had moved to Florida. They did not ask me anything, that first day. They just played. I played with them until the course closed for the winter, and every Saturday since it opened again in April. It is not the same. It is not supposed to be the same. But I go.

Twinless Twins. In January, at the library, a young woman showed me how to look things up on the computer, and the first thing I looked up was twins whose twin had died. That is how I found Twinless Twins, a support group for people who have lost their twin, at any age, in any way. I have since exchanged letters with a dozen people across the country who know exactly what this is. Some of them lost their twin as children, some at birth, some last month. I am the oldest of the bunch, I believe, and the only surveyor.

Writing this. I've been told that it helps to set things down. I was skeptical. I was wrong. Making this page has taken me most of the spring and summer at the library, two hours at a time, and the young woman at the desk has been very patient, and every Thursday afternoon I have spent an hour or two with Jerome, after a fashion. That is not nothing.

Miriam. Who has been married to one Griswold twin for forty-seven years and knew the other one nearly as long, and who has not once told me how I ought to feel.

A Word to Other Twins

If you have lost your twin, I am very sorry. I won't tell you it gets better, because I am only a year along and I don't yet know. I will tell you that it gets different, and that you are not as strange as you feel, and that there are others.

Find them. Write to them. Write to me, if you like. Go out on Saturday, whatever your Saturday is. And if somebody calls you by your twin's name at the grocery store, it is all right to just say good morning.

Jerome would have hated this page. Far too much talking, and none of it by him. I've written it anyway. He went first, so he doesn't get a vote.

-- Laurence Griswold