This day seemed to be like any other day. Wilfried got up early in the morning. While he was switching the heating on, he recognized snow had been fallen during the night. Now he wanted to make coffee and his muesli as usual. Before he could reach the studio where the kitchen is integrated, he had to cross a small space. After opening the door and making the first steps into his studio he suddenly felt he would be flying in heavenly fields and after a while like Icarus he would be falling down in an incredible speed and crash, he lost his consciousness. How long he remained that way, Wilfried does not know, but sometimes he is re-opening his eyes, and he does not recognize the world anymore. He feels like a pile of ice, completely frozen without any feeling. While he is looking around he recognizes the pile of raw meat lying on the icy floor as his own body, in the centre of a huge space which is changing its shape continuously.
What had happened? He did not remember, but looking closer he recognizes slowly the strange space is representing his own studio, and hundreds of meters above the skylight dome signalizes snow is continuosly falling.
Wilfried wants to cry for help, but his voice is failing. He is lying on the ground like a heavy stone which has no arms, no legs, no body , only his head seems to be mobile and still existing. Now only Wilfried realized the tremendous shock, before his eyes everything was moving in slow motion, while he helplessly is lying on the ground. He could shout out loud, nobody would hear him, and if his fears come true, after an accident he was critically injured. He saw himself already rotten and nobody would miss him and look for him, if he would not succeed in standing up on his own, how long could he survive in this position?
After a while in total agony, something happened, it was as if a switch was turned on inside, and the survival mode would be running keeping only some essential vital functions alive. He began to scan with his eyes the surroundings of the place where he was lying, and recognized the studio door which seemed to be hundreds of meters far away, but behind the door, the life-saving phone would be located which he had to reach in order to get saved.
But to reach it- was simply Utopean, while he was walled on the ground. He slumped in despair.
After a while he became aware that the raw meat lying on the ground, in shape of the right side of the body, was shaken by electric impulses, and while he is focussing his gaze on the handle of the studio door, he feels that his body was moving some centimeters to the direction of this door. It happens involuntarily automatically, requiring an enormous physical power. Then he falls back in agony, but after a while he feels again these electric impulses, and observes how his body millimeter for millimeter is moving and at the end of a long process of movement, up and downs of hope and despair, Wilfried feels his head leaning at the studio door, and looking above he sees the handle of the door out of any reach, because he needs to get up at least on his knees, and now only he became aware, that he could not move his left side and incredible pain is shaking his body back and forth, but in between he feels again these strange electric impulses, and without being aware, the right leg and the right arm, which obviously had not been injured try get a position so that they are able to lift the heavy paralyzed left body, and suddenly they had found the proper ankle and Wilfried feels how the right leg was supporting a movement to the right und back to the left, and again to right side and the total body was obviously moving back and forth and then he was standing first on his knees, while the left knee was continuously collapsing and he was crying out of pain, but the survival mode did not care how Wilfried was really feeling in this moment, he had to hurry up and call the emergency, otherwise he would not survive.
So factually it was a miracle, that sometimes later, Wilfried was standing uncertainly on his feet holding the door handle in his right hand and opened the door, facing the other door on the opposite he had to open, but the will to survive made him overcome also this final hurdle to open the door to the living room, face the life-saving phone and make the call .
Now it took just a short while and the emergency was driving Wilfried to the hospital where he immediately had an emergency surgery. After a long while Wilfried found himself in a wheelchair and the emergency doctor was telling him, what had happened, that his life was saved, but due to the heavy fall on the ground, the left shoulder might remain paralyzed, but time would tell.
While the accident had happened early in the morning, another miracle happened when Wilfried could leave the hospital in the early evening by taking a taxi back home – happy and very unhappy alike, he was overwhelmed by the feeling this had been the beginning of his end.
He did not know, yet, that the destroyed nerves on the body’s left side would never heal, three years later, on 9 January 2020, this was the only what Wilfried definitely knew, but also that this had not been the beginning of the end, because he wanted to live another 20 years, no matter in what kind of physical state.
But everything had changed, his life, his view on life, on art and his professional activities, and the fact, that after Micha’s death 2008, he was overwhelming himself with these activities in order to overcome this tremendous loss, he had erased any private life, he did not exist as himself, but just as a projection of other people’s desires.
But, that’s what Wilfried needs – existing himself.
