Featuring decaying dragon fruit captured with time lapse photography, “End Stage” imagines a 19-year progression of heart failure in two minutes. Set in a vacuum, the film uses the images of rotting, organic matter to separate the flesh-and-blood organ from the symbolic language that suggests one’s heart is the seat of all of the dreams, desires, memories, sorrows, rages, regrets, and other human emotions that make us uniquely ourselves — a distinctly problematic concept for those undergoing heart transplantation. Spending time with this footage was an exercise in empathy for the weakest part of myself and part of post-transplant processing.