Gately's dream-M.D. temptation (pp. 883–884)
Gately’s memories of ‘Cheers!’ ’s Nom now are clearer and vivider than any memory of the wraith-dream or the whirling wraith who said death was just everything outside you getting really slow. The implication that there might at any given time in any room be whole swarms of wraiths flitting around the hospital on errands that couldn’t affect anybody living, all way too fast to see and dropping by to watch Gately’s chest rise and fall at the rate of the sun, none of this has sunk in enough to give him the howlers, not in the wake of Joelle’s visit and the fantasies of romance and rescue, and the consequent shame.
Context
The wraith-visits generalized into a full cosmology: not one ghost but possibly "whole swarms of wraiths" in any room at any time, at quanta-speed, watching the living breathe at the rate of the sun. The wraith's time-physics restated as received doctrine — death "just everything outside you getting really slow." ("Nom" for the 'Cheers!' barfly is as the text has it — presumably "Norm.")