The line

A few weeks ago there was a circulating rumor online that the photos of Sandra Bland in her mugshot were actually photos of a dead woman.

I stared a lot at those pictures trying to see if I could tell the truth. It frightens me that it is so hard to tell.

We talk about death as if it is a definitive moment. As if there is a specific and clear ending when it is obviously, officially, over. Yet, in my experience of it, it seems a much more gradual process. Perhaps there is some line that once crossed we cannot return from but there are also a million tiny ones before that usher us to the end. I think of my grandfather in his final years and how so much of who and what he was had gone. My grandfather, whip smart and organized, a money man at Honeywell, moving all his money into a checking account for no reason we could discern. This was when we took away the control of his finances.

My grandfather seemed like himself for a long time. It was a slow realization that his stories seemed to repeat himself. There was the summer he kept commenting on the peach pie, over and over with the same exclamation of, "Peach Pie! I think I'll take a slice of that." Each time exactly the same and then followed with a story of his childhood.

Later when Brad's father died and he didn't make it to Christmas with me Grandpa Mackey asked me what had happened to "the fellow." With somber voice I told him that Brad was at home with his mom because it would be her first holiday alone. An hour later Grandpa looked around and asked the question again and I replied with the same answer. Again and again we went through this exchange, each time the same, at least four or five more times that week.

When my grandmother died we went to the funeral and I watched as again and again my grandfather slowly realized where he was and what had happened. Each time he wailed it seemed to happen for the very first time.

By the time we'd moved him out of his house and into the assisted nursing facility, it seemed like so much of him was gone. There was an element of his humor and cadence when he proclaimed to my mother that the facility's cafeteria was a restaurant he'd loved for years. But there was equally much an absence. It seemed like so much of who he was had already left.

When he went into the ER for pneumonia my mother called and told me about the gory feeling of the doctors re-animating a body that just wanted to go. She said that it seemed so painful. She said that she felt horrible. She said she wished that hadn't done it. When the pneumonia came back she called again as she sat and wait for hours then days for him to stop breathing. She said it felt like eons from the inhale to the exhale, waiting for it to finally stop.

When can you tell that someone has died? Is that final moment really the end? Or has it started so much earlier? Is it simply an arbitrary point on a long continuing line?