limbo

by Andrea A. Firth

I WAS SIXTEEN when my mother mentioned, casually, in conversation, like, oh-by-the-way: You had a twin when you were born.

We were in the living room in the late afternoon. I stretched out on the worn, green carpet avoiding my homework; she sat on the beige-and-white plaid couch flipping through the pages of Good Housekeeping. This was the room where important family matters were discussed, but that was an uncommon event and rarely included me. My mother, with her German roots, held things close to the chest. In contrast, I had inherited an inquisitive nature from my father, a journalist, and couldn’t leave this stone unturned.

I had a what? A twin? (Of course, I had questions.)

A boy or a girl?

I don’t know.

What happened to…?

I don’t know.

My mom stopped there. She had put her magazine down and was giving me her full attention, even though she wasn’t saying much. I was excited to be let in on this part of my family backstory, a big discovery for me, but I was also confused and didn’t quite know what to do with the information or what to say next.

But you were there, I said, both stating a fact and asking a question.

I was knocked out.

What?

With anesthesia. That’s how they did it back then. (Back then: 1962)

But…

The second baby wasn’t quite ready, she said, and added, The doctor told me at my age to be happy I had a healthy baby girl.

My mother was thirty-five when she had me—not that old to have a baby today but maybe considered old back then. My parents, who never used birth control beyond the Church-sanctioned rhythm method, had only one other child, my brother who was nine years older than me, unlike our friends and neighbors, mostly Italian- and Irish-Catholics, whose families often had four, five, or more children. My two close childhood friends were Mary Theresa, the oldest of six, and Mareen, the youngest of seven. I think my parents expected to have more children, but it didn’t work out that way. My birth had always been categorized as “a bit of a surprise.”

My barrage of questions didn’t upset my mother, and her cryptic answers didn’t surprise me. When it came to difficult and personal things, my mother could be reserved and sometimes emotionally guarded. Still, I was curious to know more about my twin, but I knew not to push my mother too far with more questions; when she was done talking, she was done. I gave it one more try.

But where did the baby go? I asked.

My mother paused. Then shook her head. I don’t know.

The conversation lasted less than a minute.

How does a baby just disappear?

A week after I was born, my godparents—Aunt Jane, my father’s sister and Uncle Larry, my mom’s brother—took me to the Catholic church a couple blocks from our house to be baptized.

Saint Pius X, with its white stone façade, vaulted roof, and wide banks of stained-glass doors and windows, was one of the tallest and architecturally most impressive buildings in our small suburb ten miles west of Philadelphia. The church sat on an expansive lot on the north side of a busy four-lane road across from Lawrence Park, a densely populated, middle-class neighborhood where many of the parishioners, including us, lived in modest, three-bedroom, split-level homes.

The baptism was a quick event held in the narrow vestibule in the back of the church after the midday mass. My aunt and uncle held me over the marble font as the priest poured water over my head, and I was welcomed into the faith and freed from the original sin that all Catholics are born with.

Every Sunday from ages six to twelve, I went to 9:15 am mass with my mother and then to Sunday School with the other Catholic public-school kids I knew. The hour-long religious education sessions were led by parent volunteers and mirrored the stories in the Children’s Bible I had at home. We learned about Adam and Eve eating the apple, the forbidden fruit, and how their act of disobedience led to all of us inheriting a sinful nature. We also learned about the afterlife, which seemed to work like the Cartesian coordinate system from fourth-grade math class. On Earth, we lived along the positive side of the horizontal x-axis and after we died, we moved up or down the y-axis to Heaven or Hell depending on the life we had lived. The goal was the upper right quadrant.

Unbaptized babies, like my twin, weren’t freed from original sin and were sent to a nether region called Limbo, from the Latin word limbus, which means border, edge, fringe. I couldn’t pinpoint where Limbo might be on the x-y axis grid, and at that point, I didn’t know about my twin or that their baby spirit might be stuck there.

Over the years, my mother told me other things about my birth. As an adult, my earlier curiosity about my twin resurfaces, and I start to check the facts. She said I was born on an unseasonably hot day for the middle of May. A Sunday. Mother’s Day. But when I look up the weather archives, I learn that the day’s high was sixty-six, not that hot, and typical for May in the Mid-Atlantic region before the humid summer weather arrived. I begin to wonder what else isn’t right with what I know about my birth story, what’s gotten lost or manipulated with time and memory.

I do know when and where I was conceived: October 1961 in a hotel overlooking the pink sands of Horseshoe Bay Beach in Bermuda. My mother had won a cruise to the sunny island in a grocery store sweepstakes. My father chose to share this intimate detail of their stay with me when I was thirteen, which I found completely embarrassing at the time. I still have the black and white photo of my parents, each holding an edge of the winning ticket and wearing stiff smiles, taken for the newspaper. An island cruise for two was an exotic trip for my parents whose annual vacation, if they took one, was a weekend stay at the Jersey shore with my brother in a motel. They look nervously happy, the way you feel when you move on to something unknown but exciting, like a new beginning.

My mom said she blew up like a balloon during the last couple months of her pregnancy. Back then ultrasound technology wasn’t available to track a pregnancy’s progress, and there was no mention of twins, but the doctor did tell my mother she was due in the middle of June. I arrived a month early in May.

A Taurus. I’ve never liked my Zodiac sign. The stubborn bull, short-tempered and possessive. Yes, we bulls are also known to be kind, dependable, and hardworking, a description that I think fits. But when I learn about my early arrival and think about how I might have had a June birthdate, how I might have been a Gemini, the sign of the twins, the creative and curious social butterflies of the Zodiac—I like how that fits.

My mother said that her water broke in the early afternoon, and her contractions came on hard and quick. She remembered leaning on the dresser in the bedroom digging her nails into the edge. She said she pressed so hard that she left marks. I used to look under the dresser for the arched imprints of her nails in the wood, but I could never find them.

The couple of Polaroid photos taken that day tell a happy story. One of my mother in bed smiling at a baby wrapped tightly in a white blanket. Another of my father with a cigar propped between his teeth and buried in a big smile. An arrival. A celebration. They don’t look like they’re missing a baby.

How does a baby just disappear?

As a child, I was afraid of Limbo, a place where babies never grow up, trapped in a Neverland like Peter Pan. I pictured chubby cherubs floating around in the clouds. They looked content, but I thought they must feel left out, the way I sometimes felt raised almost as a single child when my friends had homes filled with siblings. Nothing seemed right in my child’s mind about leaving innocent babies teetering on the edge of salvation and damnation. The Sunday School teachers told us to pray for these babies to be released into Heaven, and I did—passing on all my Hail Marys and Our Fathers when I said my prayers at night. We weren’t told how many prayers a baby needed to get bumped up to Heaven, but for the short term, I held on to the hope that I could help set some free.

Church-going and nighttime prayers had become sporadic events by the time I reached my teens. My parents’ marriage was fracturing. They were distracted and loosening their grip, which left me with more choice about how I spent Sunday mornings. I hadn’t rebelled; it was more like the rituals slipped away. I also learned that according to the Church, while Limbo was an eternally happy place, unbaptized babies, even if they were prayed for, were not able to enter heaven, ever. They weren’t suffering, but they were stuck. I guess my twin’s celestial location improved in 2007 when the Church got rid of Limbo. It’s not clear to me if Limbo had ever existed where the souls of unbaptized babies had been corralled for centuries, but after forty-five years, in this scenario, my twin’s spirit had been set free. That said, I wasn’t looking to the Church for answers, and I was no closer to learning what had happened to my twin.

The details revisited:

I reached out to a doctor friend who helped clarify some of the facts of my birth story. As women age into their thirties, they often release more eggs in a cycle. My mother, giving birth at thirty-five, had a greater chance of a twin pregnancy. The fact that my mother “blew up” at the end of the pregnancy could be that she developed pre-eclampsia, which leads to sudden weight gain and swelling, a condition that happens much more often with a multiple pregnancy. All these details point to the fact that there was another baby, a twin, and affirm what my mother told me. Nothing misremembered or imagined. This still leaves what happened during and after the delivery murky, said my friend, but without more information, it’s hard to say without conjecture.

When I became pregnant at thirty-one with boy-girl twins, the story of my twin came up in a brief conversation with my mother. She offered no more details, but she was excited by the idea that I was having twins, and it’s possible that she contributed to this outcome. Having twins does run in families—on the mother’s side. The inherited trait is hyperovulation, the woman’s propensity to release more than one egg which can then be fertilized. This only applies to fraternal (nonidentical) twins, like mine. Two eggs. Two sperm. Twins who are no more genetically alike than other siblings.

Once I asked my uncle/godfather, Larry, about my twin, in one of those like-oh-by-the-way conversations. I was in my fifties; both of my parents had passed away and there weren’t many people left who’d recall the specifics around my birth. Larry has always been deeply rooted in my mom’s side of the family; over the years he’s become the family archivist and the default keeper of our stories. Plus, he’s easy to talk to and has always kept in close touch with me. He didn’t hesitate to respond to my question, but his memory was vague. “Yes, I think I heard something about that” was all he could offer. I think this is less a function of his memory and more indicative of how things were communicated in my family back then. Not much was said.

What keeps driving me to find out about my twin? Maybe it’s a part of aging; I’ve reached my sixties now. Maybe it’s a desire to pull the pieces together, get all the questions answered, find a resolution. I'm not sure. But I decide to go digging.

Haverford Hospital, the small community hospital where I was born and less than a mile from the house where I grew up, closed decades ago. Google Maps tells me it’s now a medical office building. I make a few calls, and my search leads to a woman in the medical records department who assures me, “Honey, records from back then are long gone. Destroyed.” I feel like a dinosaur who’s been wiped out by an asteroid.

I know about vanishing twins, when a woman loses a baby within the first few months of a twin pregnancy. One baby continues to grow, and the other baby is reabsorbed—vanishes. My mom had mentioned a head and a body, I think. Of course, my memory has faded with time, too. Maybe I’m imagining these body parts, trying to summon my twin to life. I’ve always believed there was a second baby, like my mom told me. My twin hadn’t vanished.

Without more information, it’s hard to know what actually happened. Maybe my twin was stillborn; maybe they weren’t fully developed. But I’m still surprised that no one asked, and no one knows what happened to my twin after the birth.

A friend tells me about a funeral ceremony she attended for the indigent where the burial site was a mass grave for hundreds of unclaimed bodies with no individual markers.

This gets me thinking: this baby, my twin, could be, must be buried somewhere.

When I research what happened to stillborn babies in the 1960s, I find that in many places, stillborn babies were buried in a shared grave with other babies who had died very young. Hospitals used to take care of the burial, which meant that most parents didn’t know where their babies were buried. These shared graves were not usually marked, though they could have a plot number and be located on a cemetery plan. Today the law requires that if a baby dies after twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, their body must be buried or cremated.

I keep digging.

I find a nondenominational cemetery, established in 1923 on seventy acres in my hometown, that I never knew was there. When I call to ask about a stillborn baby grave, I know it’s going to sound strange, and I stumble over my words as I try to explain. The woman on the other end of the line is matter-of-fact. “We have an area called Babyland, but those babies have names and bronze markers,” she says. To pull a record she will need both the first and last name. When I explain that I don’t have a first name and repeat, “So you don’t have a communal plot with unmarked graves,” she gets terse. “I said we have Babyland, and no, I’m not aware of a communal grave or any babies here without two names.”

From there, I go to the website for the Pennsylvania Department of Health. The Vital Records office can provide a stillborn baby’s birth certificate for $20, but only if I am the parent of the deceased. When I call and explain my situation, I’m told directly—no exceptions. I’m redirected to the medical records department, and a kind woman agrees to do a search using my birthdate and maiden name. Nothing.

How does a baby just disappear?

I don’t know. I’ve read stories of reunited twins. People who always felt like a part of them was missing until they were reconnected with their long-lost sibling. I can’t say that I felt that something was missing in my life when I learned of my twin as a teen. But I do want to know what happened to that baby. And the more I dig into the fate of my twin, the more I feel like I’m stuck waiting for an answer that probably doesn’t exist.

I imagine having one more conversation with my mother about my twin. Not the oh-by-the-way kind, something more substantial. We’re back in the living room with the worn green carpet, and I’m seated on the matching plaid loveseat across from her. The sun peeks in through the white café curtains behind me. Part of me feels like I’m sixteen again. Part of me feels all of my sixty-three years. I look at her, then shake my head. And I realize that there’s nothing more to say.

About the author:

Andrea A. Firth is a writer, editor, and educator and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an Editor at Brevity Blog and has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California. She was a finalist for The Missouri Review's 2021 Perkoff Prize in nonfiction, and her work has appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Allium, Please See Me, Motherwell, The Coachella Review among others. Her Substack is Everything Essay! You can find her on Instagram. And more information about her is available on her website.