Today I won't lie. I spent at least an hour under a blue blanket in my living room. It felt oddly comforting to hear my family's life going on around me but not having to participate. It is pretty much how I wish the world would go most days. I could just sit in the corner and watch...maybe just hear. I don't want life to stop. I just don't feel like being a participant most times which even the thought of brings pleasure and guilt.

I did get up though. I cleaned up the house and the photo books I ordered came today. One for me and one for my mom. I wanted it to replace all the disjointed photos around my house and in boxes and taken out of frames as we have prepared for our daughters service and as I have tried and changed the best way to memorialize her here in our house. I have had a huge push, created in my own mind, to organize all these physical reminders received since her death; the obituary, her clothes that I kept, gifts from people, memorial service programs, pictures. It's like I want to make my home the same way I want to make my mind work. I want everything in it's place. I want some things to be easily accessible, I want others just to be shared at specific times, and I want others out of my life entirely. I know this might sound strange, but I have a clear picture in my head of how I want it. I made her birth announcements and I put one in the huge frame with the other big announcements in our lives...our wedding and our son's birth. I have a picture of her beside the urn that holds her remains. I have the picture I ordered to go over her crib. These things will always be in our home. For Christmas, a friend from church sent me, out of the blue, a beautiful silver ornament engraved with her name and the words "A Gift from Emmanuel". It is a treasure to me and each Christmas eve as a family we will hang it on our tree as we pause to remember another that we are waiting for. As for all the other things, the ones that can't be displayed, or I guess they could but it can get to an unhealthy point for me at least, I have a small box. I only want the extremely important things there. I think so far ahead, maybe too far. What will happen to these things when I die? I don't want more in that box than can be buried with me. So in the box there is the small photo book with her obituary and her service program and her birth announcement, all the cards from her shower and the ones sent after her death, the guest book which I filled out today with pictures and information, I have her sonogram CD and a CD of all the pictures, I have her baby book filled out as far as I could, and I have her beautiful sweater and hat that my mother ordered for her.

And all the other things, reminders, papers? I have no room for them. My heart can't bear making emotional attachments to every single thing that reminds me of her. In fact, last week my mother in law sent a present to my son. She casually mentioned to my husband that she put an angel for the baby in it. As our son dug through his presents, he flung the angel out at me. I looked at it in shock really. It was a plastic dollar store angel that read "You're Special" across it. I actually got physically hot as I looked at it. It was obvious that it was some afterthought. "Oh, the baby is an angel now so obviously she will want to have angels everywhere all over her house." Well I don't. Maybe that sounds cruel or mean, but it's survival for me. I have felt like I am on the verge of being swallowed up by these memories - many of them horrible - and being swallowed up by these things. Somehow I guess I feel if I make sense and organization of the things, I can start to organize and control my own thoughts. That if I make that hard decisions now and throw out these things that have little or no meaning I can preserve some part of my heart so that it's not totally swallowed up by this.