My grandmother left all at once. She started to leave without warning, in fact. However, she didn't take long to die. How much time do we need to die? At what point can we say we are 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 firsthand. 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 she had left.