Twinful, Twinless
"There are many rooms in my Father's house. I am going to prepare a place for you." Jesus
July 2025.
I was in Thailand with my wife. We had been occupied most of that day and hadn't really checked our phones.
Around 11 PM, we managed to get some free time and finally looked at our phones.
There were dozens of missed calls from my brother in Canada, from my family in the Philippines, and from my brother-in-law in Singapore. Different people, different places, but all of them were saying the same thing.
Karen might not have long.
I don't really remember the rest of that night properly. There are pieces of it that I can still recall, but everything else feels blurred together.
I remember arguing with my wife over something. Some disagreements over something, or maybe a lot, I don't know. I remember her telling me she was searching for flights back to Singapore, only to find out that the earliest one we could get was around 5 AM the next morning.
So I told my family.
Five in the morning. That's the earliest flight we could get.
Then I tried to at least do some work.
I opened my laptop and stared at whatever was on the screen. I probably answered something or joined a meeting. I think I typed a few emails, maybe I replied to someone.
Honestly, I don't remember.
My body was in Thailand, my laptop was in front of me, but my mind kept circling back to the same thought, like it was trying to find a way to tell me, like, I shouldn't be here.
Not tonight. Not now.
Twinful
I have a twin sister.
Karen and I were born together. I was technically older, by around 40 minutes maybe, which I sometimes used as enough justification to pretend I had some sort of older-brother authority over her.
But in reality, I didn't.
Growing up, though, we had this strange connection. I don't know if I'd actually call it telepathy because that sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, but there were moments when it felt like our minds somehow knew what the other was thinking without either of us having to say anything.
Back in college, there was this one night when she went drinking with her friends. All girls.
And yes, one of them was my ex. Let's just call her the Joyful Mystery. She was actually one of my sister's best friends. It's complicated, really. Don't ask.
Anyway, I tried to call them since it was already late and our mother will be coming home soon, but I couldn't reach them.
I'm not exactly the greatest brother in the world. I'm far from being a role model, I've made plenty of stupid decisions myself, and again, I was only 40 minutes older than Karen.
But I was protective of her.
I just wasn't very good at showing it.
So I went looking for them.
Fortunately, I also drank a lot back in college, which meant I had some useful knowledge about where drunk college kids usually went before heading home.
There were these places where we'd eat something hot and sober up enough that our parents wouldn't immediately know what we'd been doing all night. Usually lugawans (places serving lugaw, arroz caldo, rice porridge, things like that.)
I checked one. Nothing.
Then I went to another. And there they were.
My sister, her friends, the Joyful Mystery (we weren't really dating yet at that time).
All alive, all drunk.
Of course, I didn't walk in like some amazing brother who had checked multiple streets and hangouts looking for a missing sister.
I just approached them, waited for them to finish eating, and then Karen and I went back to our condo.
We barely spoke on the way home. I could tell she was mad, or maybe embarrassed, or maybe worried that I was going to tell our mother.
When we reached the condo, we separated and went to our own beds.
We never talked about that night again.
We talked about a lot of things, but somehow there were still plenty of things we never really needed to talk about.
Back when we were living in Antipolo, (around 2007 or so?), I had my own room. Her room was beside mine, but sometimes she'd use mine whenever I was in Manila.
One afternoon, I came home and immediately got scolded by our tita.
She had found an ashtray inside my room. Cigarette butts, ashes. and everything.
What followed was probably an hour or two of being lectured about smoking at a young age, bad influences, bad decisions, destroying my future, and whatever other terrible life choices apparently started with that ashtray.
I was pissed the whole time.
I didn't own an ashtray. I didn't even fucking smoke.
After that day, I never saw another cigarette butt in my room. I never smelled smoke there again either.
I didn't really talked about it with my sister.
Maybe there just wasn't a natural way to bring it up, or maybe neither of us knew how.
So I let it go. or maybe I simply forgot about it.
There were a lot of things like that between us, no discussions on some things, just silent understanding.
That also included the Joyful Mystery, which was one of her best friends.
She had become a mother young and already had a son, and honestly, I don't think Karen ever fully liked the idea of us being together.
She never directly told me not to date her friend. She never really said anything at all.
Maybe she didn't want me dating her friend. Maybe she didn't want her friend dating me. Or maybe she knew both of us well enough to realize that putting the two together was probably a stupid fucking idea.
I think it was 2013, when Joyful Mystery and I went to our place.
We weren't doing anything. We were literally just sitting at the dining table when Karen opened the door, and she saw the two of us.
Then she immediately closed the door again and walked away so fast that my brain went into full panic mode.
I left the Joyful Mystery sitting there and chased after my sister, and weirdly enough, I didn't know why I was panicking.
Was Karen angry? Also no idea.
Maybe she wasn't even angry. Maybe I just assumed she was.
Well, that was the incident. The first and the last.
And naturally, because apparently this was how Karen and I handled half of our problems, we never really talked about it afterward.
It's funny.
You can grow up beside someone, share a birthday, share parents, childhood memories, friends, secrets, and the same fucking womb.
And still somehow be terrible at communicating.
Maybe we always assumed there would be more time to talk about things later.
One hour
Past 9 AM, Changi Airport.
Our plane had just landed back in Singapore.
I was asleep when the tires hit the runway. The screech of rubber against concrete woke me up, and for a few seconds, my brain hadn't fully caught up with where I was yet.
I opened my eyes and looked at my wife sitting beside me at the window seat.
She was staring at her phone.
There was something wrong with her face. Not physically, just the expression. I think she was still upset about the fight, or maybe she was still processing. I couldn't read it.
Then she looked at me.
"Karen is gone."
My brain didn't register it. Not immediately.
She kept talking about my brother calling, my mother, my tita, people trying to reach us.
But I wasn't really hearing any of the the words.
It felt like somebody had suddenly lowered the volume on the entire plane.
I took out my phone and called my brother-in-law.
He answered, struggling to speak. Then somehow he got the words out.
Karen had stopped breathing.
And suddenly my brain caught up.
It felt like being hit by something massive. A truck, a wall, a bird, an airplane. I don't know.
We got off the plane, collected our small luggage, and booked a ride straight to Singapore General Hospital.
When we arrived, we rushed inside.
Outside Karen's ward, my mother and tita were sitting on the metal seats. Their eyes were swollen and their faces looked exhausted. My wife and I went inside.
Karen's bed was at the far end of the ward, hidden behind a thick green curtain. My brother-in-law saw us, walked over, and the three of us stepped through it together.
And there she was. Karen.
The first thought that came into my head was incredibly stupid.
This is the first dead body I've ever seen.
I've seen dead bodies in movies, TV shows, documentaries. You see them enough times that the image itself becomes familiar, somehow.
A person lying still. Eyes closed. No movement.
I think I've seen it before in real life too, but I don't remember it.
But this was different, because this wasn't some person or some stranger.
Our mother used to tell us that we shared the same "bed" inside her womb.
Nine months together before either of us even saw the world. Born on the same day, in the same place, forty minutes apart.
Technically, we entered this world together. I had never really thought about what that meant.
Maybe somewhere in some stupid corner of my mind, I assumed we'd also leave it around the same time.
Not exactly together, but close enough.
Both of us arguing about whose memory was worse.. Something like that.
Instead, there she was. She was my better half, literally my other half. Prenatally.
Everyone was crying. My wife. My mother. My tita. My brother-in-law.
He told us Karen had tried to stay awake despite struggling to breathe. They probably already knew where everything was heading. They probably knew they were watching the finish line approaching.
And we were late, by around one hour.
We crossed countries and flew back as fast as we could, and still missed her by sixty minutes.
Really fucking great, Jesus.
I don't know who I was angry at.
Myself? The airline? Thailand? Cancer? God? Myself? Time? Myself?
Probably all of them. Maybe none of them. I don't know.
The empty space
Eventually, the nurses took Karen's body away.
My brother-in-law went with them, while the rest of us went back to our places.
Because apparently when someone dies, the world cannot stop, which is really one of the strangest parts.
There are still stuff to do, calls to make, schedules to arrange, funeral preparations, people asking questions, and people waiting for answers.
Life continues doing all these completely ordinary things while yours feels like it just got split in half.
The funeral would be held at the void deck beneath their block.
I've walked past countless funerals at void decks around Singapore.
You see the tables, plastic chairs, curtains, people sitting quietly, a casket somewhere inside. Sometimes there's music. Sometimes prayers.
And most of the time, when you pass by one, you just keep walking, Because it isn't your funeral.
It isn't your family. You're just somebody passing by. An outsider looking in.
This time, I had to walk inside. And not just for somebody I knew.
Really fuckin great, Jesus.
On the first day of the funeral, I still had work. My family tried to understand.
I hadn't told my team at work what was happening before that. That day, I finally told them I wouldn't be able to attend toward the end of the week because that would be my sister's burial.
I think they were supportive and understanding. I really can't recall. Maybe I didn't care to remember.
On the other hand, my wife was upset with me. Maybe angry. I think we fought because I was still working while my sister's body was at the hospital being prepared for the funeral. I honestly don't remember exactly what we said, or what I said.
I barely remember that entire week.
Those days feel like someone recorded everything, deleted random parts, then stitched whatever was left back together.
That night, I went downstairs to the void deck.
Nobody was there yet, but everything had already been prepared.
Tables and chairs were arranged neatly. At the front was a cross with Jesus looking down from it, and beneath it was a space where Karen's casket would go. body would be brought here the next day, and the funeral would begin.
But that night, it was just an empty space. I sat at one of the tables facing it.
Just me. And that empty space.
I don't know how long I sat there.
Maybe I was waiting for something.
Maybe I wanted someone to walk in and tell me I was at the wrong place. Maybe I wanted to wake up, but I wasn't even fucking asleep. Maybe I fucking hate this empty space.
Eventually, I stopped looking. I closed my eyes and put both hands over my face, and just stayed like that.
There are moments when your body seems to understand something before your mind does.
Your brain keeps trying to negotiate.
Maybe this. Maybe that. Maybe somehow.
But your body has already surrendered to the truth.
Twinless
The last day came.
We were at the church, with Karen's casket brought to the front. A priest came in and started the Mass.
I appreciated my brother-in-law's family being there. I don't think most of them were Catholic. Maybe none of them were.
It didn't matter.
They came.
They sat with us, stood when everyone stood, and stayed.
Sometimes that's enough.
After Mass, we followed the casket outside as it was brought toward the vehicle that would take her to the crematorium.
Our family and my brother-in-law's family boarded a bus they had rented.
A few minutes later, we arrived.
We entered the observation room, where a large glass window overlooked the floor below.
Then Karen appeared. Or rather, her casket did.
It slowly moved across the floor while music played in the background.
I watched it travel toward another room, where the furnace was.
The room where the wood, fabric, flowers, and the body would disappear into heat.
That's when something finally clicked.
Not at the hospital.
Not when my wife told me on the plane.
Not when I saw her at the ward.
Not when I saw her inside the casket.
Not even during Mass.
There.
Watching that casket slowly move away from us.
There was no negotiating with that image anymore.
No maybe.
No later.
No more unfinished conversations.
No more silently understanding each other.
No more getting annoyed and deciding we'd deal with it some other day.
No more other day.
For almost my entire life, the word twin meant there were two of us.
It wasn't something I thought about.
You don't think about having two hands until one of them is gone.
Some things are simply there.
Permanent.
Built into the structure of your world. She was like that.
I had never existed in a world without a twin.
It felt like a stupid thing to think about at the time, but the truth was, I had never really imagined a world where there was only one of us.
Even before I had memories, she was already there.
Before we had names.
Before either of us had seen our mother.
Before light.
Before sound.
Before the first breath.
There were two of us.
We were twinful.
Then that casket disappeared into the room.
And suddenly there's just one.
Twinless.
I don't know if there's supposed to be some grand lesson at the end of something like this.
Maybe an older version of me would have tried to find one.
Build character.
Become stronger.
Change your perspective.
Some poetic bullshit like that.
But cancer doesn't always leave you with wisdom.
Sometimes it just takes someone.
Sometimes it leaves an empty chair, an unused pair of glasses, a birthday that now belongs to only one living person, and photographs that suddenly become more valuable because there will never be another new one.
Sometimes it leaves a twin staring at the word twin and wondering whether he still gets to use it.
Am I still a twin if the other one is gone? I don't know.
Stupid, fucking, selfish thought.
People say someone lives on through memories.
Maybe that's true.
I have plenty.
Arguments we never started.
Arguments we never finished.
Things we understood without saying anything.
Forty minutes.
A lifetime.
And one hour too late.
I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with all that information.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe you don't "move on" from some people. Maybe you just keep moving while carrying the space they used to occupy.
And every now and then, you look at that empty chair at living room, expecting them to still be there.
For nearly four decades, somewhere on Earth, I knew there was another person carrying the same birthday, the same childhood, the same parents, and pieces of the same story.
Then cancer decided there should only be one of us.
So yeah.
Fuck you, Cancer.
