Making the Cut is an heirloom engineered for disappearance, a slow ritual of familial memory measured in millimeters. Using the cedar ridgepole scrap from my grandfather’s house, still bearing the original saw marks, I initiated a protocol in which each generation erases the trace of the previous generation by recutting the same line. The act is intimate and exacting: a blade-width of wood removed, the sawdust collected, and the gesture repeated once the items is passed down to the next heir. What begins as a mark of construction becomes a site of grief, approval, and the fragile transmission of inheritance. The idiom “making the cut” is refigured as both permission and subtraction, a way to honor while also slowly undoing. Over time, this process transforms the beam from a solid artifact into a vanishing ledger of care, grief, and lineage. Designed to consume itself over 8,000 years, this heirloom becomes a long, slow elegy, its material form thinning across centuries even as its meaning thickens.