Epilogue

      The twins were forty-three when they last saw each other in the spring of 1963. An Air Force assignment in the New Mexico desert was a long way from the truck driving hub of central New Jersey, especially when those long-houred jobs barely supported growing families. 

     Francis died suddenly of a heart attack in 1968 not long after Frank was nearly killed in an accident while hauling a loaded trailer from Queens back to his home base at Apgar Trucking in Bound Brook. He survived a traumatic brain injury and femoral artery tear thanks to a companion trucker who pulled him from the burning wreckage and held pressure on the leg wound until the rescue squad arrived. The long physical and financial recovery from those injuries made travel to his twin's funeral undoable. 

     Loss of an adult sibling is always painful, but it can be even more devastating for a surviving twin.(1) My father never talked about it, but he seemed to carry an underlying sadness for the rest of his life, surviving two cardiac arrests before succumbing to lung cancer in 1986. His only deathbed regret was wishing he could have seen "Francis's little girl in West Virginia." This was a request his children could hardly fulfill when it was the first time anyone had heard of this cousin. 

     Not long ago I received an unexpected message on 23 & Me from an unknown cousin listed as the granddaughter of my father. My first thought was to message my six siblings that here at last, nearly forty years after our father's death, was that little girl in West Virginia he regretted never seeing. Before pressing send I decided to ask this new cousin who her parents were. It turned out the mother, my supposed long lost sister, was born out of wedlock to a German seamstress and a U.S. soldier who soon disappeared into the post-war confusion of 1946 Berlin. Knowing my father never made it to the German capital, it was apparent this new cousin was instead the granddaughter of his genetically indistinguishable twin.

     It could be that my uncle was as good at spreading his seed as he was at sharing a smile, but what I really believe is that my father used that niece as a proxy for expressing the unspeakable pain of losing a twin. Barring any new genetic surprises, the identity of "Francis's little girl in West Virginia" will likely remain a conundrum that I too will take to my grave along with those Beatty twins.

1. Creed, J. (2022). The uniqueness of twin loss and grief. Bereavement, 1. https://doi.org/10.54210/bj.2022.8