If you have to cry in public,
the sauna at the Y is a good place to do it.
As long as you are quiet, everyone's eyes
are averted.
Steam clouds vision and the tears drip with sweat to the wet musty floor.

I think about my dad as I take in the thick hot air.
I think about his final moments a decade earlier when in the middle of sleep he just
stopped breathing.
It was so calm and brief he didn't wake mom.
Was he giving her what he thought she wanted? no debt? a house? funds to support her church and those she would call her grandsons?

I fixate on that last breath
that final thought.
If it was lucid, I suspect it was encouraging and hopeful.
A promise of a rainbow after a storm.