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.