I have two sons who are angels…

My son Andrew Robert was born July 11, 1998. He died the day before he was born, on July 10. We have no reason why, but we certainly miss him terribly.

Exactly one year and one week after Andrew died, I delivered twins. I had a placental abruption on July 17, 1999, that claimed the life of my second angel, Mark Andrew..

We always think that lightning won’t strike us twice. Well, in a way it did. I had two of my sons die. But it wasn’t really lightning.

Andrew I would compare to a hurricane. Warning that something is coming, but you don’t really know how bad it will be. I kept feeling like something was wrong, but the doctors watching him kept assuring me he was fine. Then the hurricane hit, and he died – total devastation was the result of my little personal hurricane.

Then Mark I would compare to an earthquake. No warning – just complete disaster out of the blue. The babies are fine, the babies are fine, then BOOM! an abruption and one of my babies is dead and the other is fighting for his life – definitely off the Richter scale there!

So, my losses weren’t like lightning…but definitely natural disasters.

I think we all think, ok, it happened once so it can’t happen again. And then – it happened twice –NO WAY will it happen again, but it does. It’s truly heartbreaking.

But you know what, we have lived through the worst possible thing that can happen to a parent. We have survived the death of our children. And now we know that they are waiting for us to come home to them.

Losing a twin is different from losing a singleton. Different, hard, but not harder so to speak. It really depends on who you talk to and how they think. For me losing Mark was much harder than losing Andrew. But not because of one child over the other. I lost what I felt was God’s promise to me, I lost my son, I lost the opportunity to mother twins, I lost my son’s best friend, all at one time. If I had not lost Andrew, then Mark’s death would affect me differently than it has. But then again, if I had not lost Andrew, I would not have had the twins at all.

It’s all a big circle – a big circle of grief that stinks! I just figure that we love all our children, but we act differently toward each one because of their individual personalities. So it is with losing my two babies. I react to their deaths differently because they are two different children and I am at a different point in my life.

Some people think – oh it has to be harder to lose a twin because of the constant reminder of what should have been. Some people think – oh it has to be easier because at least she still has one. You know what, it’s both! Easier because I have Matthew and harder because I see what I’m missing.

Tammy