Annie Niu: Woman pretends to be dead twin every holiday as grandparents don’t know she died 3 years ago
A twin admitted that she still poses as her sister, three years after her sibling's death. According to Annie Niu, meningitis, a sometimes fatal swelling of the brain or spinal cord was the cause of the death of her twin sister, who she chose not to identify. But three years later, Niu has admitted that her grandparents are still unaware of the tragic loss – all because she poses as her sister.
She revealed in a TikTok video that she pretended to be her deceased sister when she called her grandparents during the holidays in order to spare her senior relatives from grieving in old age. "POV: your twin sister passed away three years ago but you still haven't told your grandparents so now you have to call them every holiday pretending to be her," she wrote in the video.
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The footage elicited astonishment and comprehension in equal measure. One commenter wrote: "Annie…no way." Another felt more empathetic: "My wife's uncle died a few years back and it totally shattered her grandparents. I'm pretty sure it's going to take a few years off their lives." In a video posted on Sunday, December 25, Niu responded to critics by stating that protecting her grandparents from heartache is fundamental to her culture. "A lot of y'all don't understand; this is really common in Asian culture," she explained, per reported by The US Sun. "We try to shield the elderly from terrible news." She fears that if her grandparents realized what had happened to her sister, their health may deteriorate. "They don't deserve to die, and you can't guarantee that that's not going to happen if you tell them," she continued, "we are probably just going to continue making up excuses why she isn't visiting them."
Niu said that her sister died from meningitis, a unique sickness that is immune to other bacterial and viral illnesses. Niu explains her culture to her 98.6k followers in order to foster understanding. Given how close the twins were to their grandparents, breaking the news to them was even more difficult. "My grandparents basically raised me and my sister, so we were very close to them." She says, spending some time as her sister helps her heal. "I dream about her almost every single night, so I treat it as I am spending half of my life with her still because I see her every night," she explains, fighting back tears.
