»I am now in the silence behind the silence,« my twin sister Jutta said a few weeks before her death. She weighed only twenty-four kilos, resembling an iconic image of horror that has etched itself deep into the German psyche, yet simultaneously cannot or will not be seen. Death in general. We see it constantly, ever since the advent of media, television, and the internet. Through social media, it follows us right into our living rooms, in a colorful sequence. Between fashion, spiritual advice, recipes, and health tips, it jumps out at us, almost unavoidably, in our faces. Death and war everywhere. And yet, it remains somehow distant, somehow not concerning us: Sure, we show solidarity here and there and display our empathy on social media.
In the midst of this, a thought arises: I will never die! This thought emerges as if from nowhere: I am immortal, only others die.
And yet, death remains a taboo—at least in our Western society. The dying are taken to hospitals, death is sanitized, suppressed—and in truth, one is relieved to leave the hospital after a brief, helpless visit. Or one feels sad and powerless. This secret thought: I am immortal—is not entirely wrong. If understood spiritually. From a material perspective, death looks horrific, the body decays, the deceased suddenly appears unrecognizable, so utterly different, alien. Within a few days, it begins to decompose. It is buried, cremated—ashes to ashes.
And the spiritual approach? The dilemma is: In our Western world, there is no real, no spiritual access to dying, no path inward. Religions, at best and only occasionally, can offer somecomfort, nothing more. The existential questions—Who am I really? Where am I going? What comes after death?—are met only with beliefs. No inner experiences, no path inward. Where and how do we find spirituality?
In the midst of this, a thought arises: I will never die! This thought emerges as if from nowhere: I am immortal, only others die.
Jutta died at home, self-determined until the end. Three months before her death, she had finished writing her book: ›My Life Without Me‹ (Weissbooks Verlag). The book—a comic,—was her, as she called it ›wailing wall‹: An angry cry, full of fear and despair, yet filled with spiritual questions, doubts, and inner reflections. A wild work, in the words of Dylan Thomas: »Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.«
But then something suddenly changed. Jutta lost her fear.
At that time, I was in California. We chatted every day, talked on the phone. Then I didn’t hear from her for a few days. I called her son Severin, and he confirmed what I feared: she was too ill. The metastases had spread to her neck, her spine, almost all her bones. She was vomiting every few hours. I called her immediately and said, »I’m flying to you tomorrow, I’ll book the flight right away.« But she said: »I can die alone, you don’t need to come. In the last ten meters of the finish line, I’ve separated from you. Don’t come as my twin, out of old patterns or felt obligations. I’m free of that now. But if you see my dying process as important for your own development—purely for yourself—then I’d be happy if you came. Think it over calmly.«
I flew the next day. Her response shook and calmed me at the same time. She was free from our bond. I wasn’t there yet, but I felt that she had left me. She was now walking her path, consciously toward death. Into the great mystery.
Most of the time, she meditated. Rainer (Langhans) accompanied her spiritually, initially talking with her a lot—but later, he lay silently beside her, meditating with her. All anger and despair had left Jutta. She looked beautiful, young, and transparent. She weighed only twenty-five kilos. Sometimes she said: »The devil has nothing left to chew on me.« Once, after her son Severin and I had washed her, standing awkwardly and suddenly shy by her bed, I said: »This must all seem like a theatre to you, what we’re doing here?« She smiled at us tenderly, with a hint of mockery: »Yes, but a loving theatre.«
After she lost her fear, she said: »All this time, I was so afraid: I knew I couldn’t die. It was as if I had to jump over a black river, knowing I would sink and it would swallow me. I couldn’t! I can’t die! But now I’ve jumped, and when I turned around, there was no river. It didn’t exist. I was standing in a peaceful landscape.«
She decided to stop eating, to fast radically, and said: »I’m putting everything on one card now: either the cancer dies, or I do.« The doctor said that in her condition, without food, she would live at most two weeks. She lived for three more months. During that time, I photographed her every day with my iPhone. I had been photographing her for years during her progressing illness, over a thousand photos. Now, though, it was perhaps also a way to cope with her dying and to face the fear. Often, I saw her as otherworldly beautiful and wanted to capture that. We didn’t talk much anymore; most of the time, she sent us out of the room, wanting to be alone, saying: »I need to go deeper inward.« Sometimes she spoke at length, and we couldn’t understand her. It was clear to me that she was somewhere else entirely. In her world, wherever that was, she was fully conscious, not confused, but no longer connected to our world.
At some point, she had wondered aloud whether it had been right to publish her book so full of anger and fear. Thoughtfully, she said she wanted to write another book, one that would help people be less afraid. »You’ll have to do that. I no longer have the strength,« she said. But the reason was that inner experiences lie beyond language and cannot truly be conveyed. Even saints speak in parables.
I, a child of the Enlightenment, a disciple of doubt, wrestling with my inner contradictions, have been walking a spiritual path with Rainer and three other women since the window of ’68 closed again, sometimes asking myself: Have I gone mad? God is dead, isn’t he?
Jutta was the first to meet Rainer, who offered her a perspective when we were all searching for a way forward after the failure of the ’68 revolution, the great ecstasy. Our entire generation was searching for a path. Some, like the RAF, took the path of violence with weapons, murder, and despair. Some were drawn to India, to Osho. Some died. We mourned the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, and somehow sensed: We can’t go back to the old life. Once you’ve been in another, more loving world, you can’t return to the old, bourgeois world with all its everyday violence. And Rainer said: »Now the path goes inward. What we lived and saw in that historical moment of ’68—that reality is love—we must now find within ourselves. The revolutionary must
revolutionize themselves.«
I, and three other women, joined Rainer and Jutta over time. Later, the media called us a harem, but we are the continuation of the commune: a spiritual commune and love community, all on the same path, though we are very different. None of us, certainly not me, imagined it would be such a long and difficult journey. A path of learning to die in order to live and to come into love. Meditation (still a black box after decades), letting go, overcoming our narrow patterns. A long path of failing, stumbling forward. And yet not in vain, though it sometimes feels that way.
And yet, this imperceptible nothingness is always present. Failing is the fundamental principle of our spiritual path. Failing forward. Even if everything seems futile: behind consciousness, behind perception, something invisible and indescribable is happening.
In 5 hours we will take Jutta’s ashes to the Ganges. I can’t sleep… I every now and then cry… next to me the Ganges, silver and black and still… from the distance singing and drumming, a dog is barking… A strange beauty
Jutta, after a fierce inner struggle, after fear and despair, immersed herself in the nothingness. And so I understand her message, »I am now in the silence behind the silence« as her attempt to tell us: »I am in the place of indescribable silence. I’ll tell you more later.«
With my exhibition, I want to show the beauty behind the horror, the light that radiated from Jutta at the end: the inner event that death is not the end but a transition to life. And failure is already built into love. The invisible cannot be shown in images. And yet, it’s worth a try.