If my grandfather hadn’t uncharacteristically mentioned fatigue on the horse ride back from surveying the new fence beyond the hill, if he hadn’t lain down on the porch bench and covered his face with his hat, if my uncle hadn’t asked what he thought of the new calf and, when he didn’t answer, hadn’t noticed that my grandfather wasn’t snoring as usual and hadn’t uncovered grandpa’s face and seen his eyes were glazed and the right side of his mouth pulled just a little and if my other uncle hadn’t come to visit in the new truck with the tires that could cross the creek even when it was running high and covering the muddied dirt road and if the brothers hadn’t carried their father into the backseat against my grandmother’s wishes and driven past the village clinic and all the way to the city my grandfather avoided and if nobody had thought to call their sisters, and if my aunts hadn’t met them at the hospital, and if my grandfather’s many children hadn’t insisted that everything that could be done be done because he was beloved and they couldn’t fathom a world without him in it and if they hadn’t told the doctors that yes, they understood, but they needed him to be okay and any chance is a chance and if they hadn’t spent hours at his bedside, weeks, months, counting every sigh or groan or twitch as a sign, a message, an acknowledgement, and if they had listened to my grandmother when she said no tracheotomy and no gastrostomy and no more no more no more, then maybe instead of spending the last seven months of his life amidst the bustle of the city, bathed by daughters, fed by sons, my grandfather would have ended his days on the hard wooden bench of the farmhouse porch where, for most of his life, he’d lain down, one knee propped, hat over his head, to rest his eyes.