A while ago we realized that in the Schrödinger's Cat scenario, where the cat exists in some superposition of "alive" and "dead" states, that one could in fact glimpse a kind of sliding scale. There's no one state of "alive" for a cat, but a subset of microstates of material existence that can be regarded as compatible with continuing homeostasis, and another subset of microstates that was unequivocally inanimate, and yet more microstates that you could call "dying but not dead", i.e. there was still some probability that these microstates would lead to continued life. There's only a relatively limited range of microstates—particular arrangements of the physical substances that constitute a cat—which are compatible with life; there's vastly many more microstates, different arrangements of the same matter, that are unquestionably dead. Hence death is like a manifestation of entropy, which Boltzmann taught us was logarithmically proportional to the number of microstates.
So you can think of Schrödinger's Cat getting deader over time, in a sense, as time ticks onward and it becomes more and more probable that the radioactive decay occurred and the poison was released.
But it only just now occurred to me that there's a much simpler physical system where you can definitely see this occurring—where a living being can go from "alive" to "partly dead" to "mostly dead" to "dead" in a very obvious progression: all you need to do is drop them from high up enough. (You're not all the way dead when you're halfway to the ground, even though death looks certain—there's still a chance Bugs Bunny might shove a mattress into place below you, just in time!)
~Chara