Eternal Nestling

When Rosi Evers was two years old, her mother read in 1957 in a women’s magazine about Down’s Syndrome and recognized what is different between her little girl and the two older sisters. With seven they won to give her in a kindergarten, with eleven she started to go to a regular school. »She didn’t like mathematics, but I wanted her to learn everything she can. She learned to read and to write.« Uschi Istas is seven years older and as the »middle sister« she became the herding dog of the family. She founded a small foundation with other parents to build a place, where 23 people with handicap can live their life. Rosi could go to work, every week she loved the dancing class. Every weekend she was with the family. For decades Uschi invited her younger sister to travel with her, called her Röschen, »Little Rose«. 2016 they had to find a new place for Rosi, because she needed more and more help. And again this search became a pioneer work. Only two month later her mum died with 99. And for all it feels like she may have allowed herself to leave because now she knew the last home of her daughter. Rosi’s world became smaller and smaller. Dementia is hard to diagnose, like every illness of somebody who lives a part of his life in his own world. She lost more and more words, in the end the names of her sisters. In January 2019 she got strong epileptic seizures and after weeks of disappearing more and more she died in February. »What is my sense of life?« Uschi asks herself now again and again. »Rosi has been the only one who accepted me the way I am.«

Since her first semester of her studies of »Photojournalism and Documentary Photography« 2014/15 in Hanover, Germany, Stefanie Silber is with the family. They became very close, so Stefanie was allowed to help to dress Rosi for her last travel with the clothes Uschi chosed. The history of the sisters changed now to the question how to live with this loss, this gap after a symbiotic life.