My grandmother passed away suddenly. She started to break down without warning, in fact. But dying did not take so long. How much time do we need to die? At what point can we say that we are already dead? She was diagnosed with a type of dementia that in a few months reduced her to a thousandth of what she had been. Or so we would say from the outside, those of us who did not witness her evaporation on the front lines. My cousin Cristina, on the other hand, knew how to find her in the most unexpected corners of her personality – in a wink, for example – cornered by the minimal capacity for expression that was still available to her.

The increase in labor absenteeism across the State has shaken the news in recent weeks. Especially, since the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said it is "a cancer we cannot afford" and, later, that the criticism for these words were "the same to him". But the labor market in the Balearic Islands, on this issue, is going its own way: the Archipelago currently has the lowest absenteeism rate in Spain, 5.9% above the number of employed in the first quarter of 2026. If only temporary disability leave is counted, the percentage is even lower: 4.3%. Why this happens is an unknown for the Government.

Let's imagine the case of a middle-aged person who, one day, flipping through their phone, comes across a selfie they took a year earlier. It should be that their body has experienced a more acute decline than usual. an article published in the magazine Nature Aging He claimed that it happens to all of us at least twice in our lives.