Co-Multiple story of loss and unanswered concerns

As a co-multiple who has lost his twin, I’m looking at your site and have decided to attempt to connect, although I’m getting very frustrated in my efforts to learn about my own loss and how it has affected me. My identical twin was killed in a car wreck 40 years ago when we were 18.

Rather than grieving, I just went forward with the momentum of my life. I was smart, athletic, engaged. Life went on. My two remaining brothers and my parents did not share our grief and our family began to drift apart.

In my 20s, I dropped out of college, protested the draft and the war in Vietnam, found a passionate interest in woodworking (it runs in the family). I was willing to live on nothing for several years while I learned on my own. Was this struggle to do it on my own a sign of trouble? I also began to become very frustrated at my difficulty forming a good intimate, long lasting love relationship. I was experiencing more and more loneliness as my crowd slowly drifted into their careers and families.

I finally fell in love, got married at 40, bought a home, had a child, and spent the last 18 years fighting to do my craft, build the home and garden, be a very involved dad, and support my wife at home. It’s been an exhausting struggle, but I felt happy and fulfilled. Until my wife announced that she was leaving, last January, siting “my abusive anger”.

This has rocked my whole world. I was not very aware of my anger. I figured we had normal marital conflicts and thought we’d eventually work it out. Except that my wife was getting more and more distant and unwilling to have serious talk about our issues. So now I’m alone, working very hard to understand what has happened, and always coming back to all the grief and loneliness I feel in missing my twin.

My woodworking seems to be at a dead end, my family is still in conflict and can’t be relied upon, and I feel distant from my community no matter how hard I try to engage. I’ve slowly lost all the good Buddies I had to share my interests with, although I have many good friends, they just don’t seem to be there for the closeness I crave.

I’ve been trying to look into the twinless groups, but have been unable to find anyone who can share knowledge or experience about how being twinless may be causing me to loose all those I feel close to and to always end up feeling so desperately alone. I am looking for answers more than just sympathetic support.

Yours, Richard