death in the afternoon

This morning I am asked to see an old lady in a nursing home. She looks very frail,is uncommunicative and has a nasty grey colouring. I'm not sure exactly why, because she has presented in this way for the last several years, but I tell the staff that I fear she is dying. Three hours later they call me again to tell me she has indeed passed into another world. I go round straight away (so as to avoid going after work and delaying my return home) and there she is. I am shocked, because no matter how ill she looked this morning, she looked completely different now. A large, dark mark had appeared on her left cheek, and her colour was now a different, if anything even more ashen shade.

Sometimes people even look somehow better after they die, like my own father, who seemed 10 years younger just after he died, and he had such a good tan his colour wasn't that bad, thankfully...