In the final act of dying of natural causes the body (based only in what I could observe from my vantage point of that fucking hardback chair that held my ass for the third deathwatch vigil in as many days) takes however much time it needs to die: there's no such thing as a quick (natural) death, the internal, physiological process of dying measured in hours or days or weeks being "quick" only when balanced against the timeline of life in its entirety.

(I have my doubts that the mind/spirit/whatever has anything to do with it (waiting for the right moment, etc etc) but that’s nothing out of the ordinary for my faithless / faith-challenged heathen self.)

Life is, after all, our universal terminal illness; it is death’s only prerequisite.