Spooky Echoes

Raise the dust of memories

Spooky echoes reverberate
through this half-empty house
raising the dust of memories
I thought
I had swept out of the door.

Is it the ghost
of the oxygen concentrator
I hear
echoing down the hall
and waking me
in the middle of the night?

I want to remember
the healthy single mother
who raised
four children by herself
and not
the frail elderly woman lying
in the hospice hospital bed.