Discovering A Family's Rare Gift

When one of her identical twins died shortly after he was born, a brave mother decided to donate his tissue to science. Then she followed it wherever it went

- Sarah Gray

I WAS THREE MONTHS PREGNANT with identical twin boys when my husband, Ross, and I learned that one of them had a fatal birth defect. Our son Thomas had anencephaly, which means that his skull and brain were not formed properly. Babies with this diagnosis typically die in utero or within minutes, hours, or days of being born.

This news was devastating, and also confusing. I had never heard of this before, and it didn’t run in my family. I wondered, Was it something I ate, was it something I drank, was it something I did? But then, even if it was, why was one of them perfectly healthy?

So I was wrestling with a lot of questions that would never have answers. And I had to make peace with that. It was like having an annoying hum in the background.

Six months later, the twins were born, and they were both born alive. Thomas lived for six days. Callum was healthy, and Ross and I moved on the best that we could. We had a beautiful, healthy boy to raise.

We decided early on to tell Callum the truth about his brother. We have a few pictures of Thomas in our home. It was a few years later that Callum started to comprehend what we were trying to tell him.

Sometimes he said things that were sad, and sometimes he said things that were kind of funny. We visit Thomas’s grave a couple of times a year, and one time we told Callum that we were going to bring some flowers to put on Thomas’s grave.

Callum picked up one of his little Matchbox cars and said, “I want to put this on the grave too,” which I thought was really sweet.

Later on, we were on the sofa watching cartoons, and Callum said, “Mummy, what is it like in heaven?” I don’t really know, so I did my best. “You know, some people think it’s a place you go when you die. Some people don’t believe it’s there.”