“She had felt it for some days now — the slow withdrawal of the body from its own operations, the way the lungs took longer to fill, the way the heart seemed to pause between beats as though reconsidering whether the next one was worth the effort. Her fingers, once nimble enough to sketch a likeness in charcoal within minutes, now trembled when she lifted a pen. Her eyes, those bright blue eyes that every lover she had ever taken had remarked upon, saw the world through a veil of gauze that thickened with each passing week. The garden beyond the French windows was a wash of greens and golds, impressionist rather than realist, and she supposed there was a certain beauty in that — the world becoming a painting just as she was preparing to leave it.”