Reliquary

In my wardrobe there are three boxes.

One contains my wedding dress.
I don't know quite know why I have held on to that dress.
I will never wear it again.
I could never hope to do that dress up again. It was a bit of a squash on my wedding day.
I'm sure that fashions will have changed by the time that Jessica gets married, even assuming that she grows up to be the same height and dress size as her mother.
My own mother cut up her wedding dress to make me a costume for a school play when I was about eight years old. Perhaps that will be the eventual fate of my own wedding dress? Or dressing up clothes perhaps?

A plain, cream box. Inside are clothes.
Bought by another person, in anticipation of an event she will never anticipate again.
Enormous dresses for a child of 12-18 months, socks, small soft shoes.
Items that were bought twice over and one set put away.
Jessica is about to grow into half of the set now. A pink corduroy pinafore. A soft cotton party dress, in green and red. These have been waiting to be worn since August 2008.
I bought them on my lunch break. I was desperate for the lady at the till to ask me why I was buying two identical items. But she didn't.

Next is a plain white cardboard box, decorated with a dark pink ribbon and a small elephant motif.

After the twins were born, my husband left to pick things up from home, clothes and toothpaste and so on. He asked the nurse looking after the girls if he could bring them a toy each. We had not bought any toys for the twins, not yet. But he took the small hanging toys from the front of their bouncy chairs, which had a jungle theme. An elephant and a hippopotamus. He told me it was to inspire our girls to grow big and strong, just like their toys.

Georgina had the elephant in her incubator and Jessica, the hippopotamus.

This is why I chose the elephant motif for Georgina's box. Jessica's has a teddy bear, I'm guessing that hippopotamuses aren't overly popular with your average baby crowd.

Inside that box is a woollen hat. It is pale pink. It has long strings hanging down from either side, these are used to tie a ventilator mouth piece in position. It has a blood stain on one side.

I'm actually jealous of this hat and yet it is one of the most precious items in this box. The hat held my daughter's head, so tenderly, for longer than my own clumsy hands were able to. It touched her skin, held her fragile baby skull, for longer than I ever will. It soaked up the blood that I longed to sponge away from the side of her mouth.

Inside that box is nearly everything that ever touched my daughter's skin whilst she alive. Her tiny sheet. Her monitor pads and probes.

Foot prints and hand prints. Incongruously bright, multicoloured ink. Red, orange and yellow. These were taken after her death. Now I wonder, what sort of mother lets a stranger put her dead child's hands and feet up against a cheerful brightly coloured ink pad and stamp them down?

The photographs that I think I will always hide away. I've considered showing them to, at the very most, two people. Not family who didn't see her. Just people who I know would respect her, who know that she was more than that tiny, agonised body. I may still show these photographs, one day when I'm braver.

If you've been reading here for a little while you will have an idea what they look like, not a million miles away from Jessica's early photographs. But I can't have one on display in the house. She doesn't look like I remember her. When I see a photograph of Georgina, all I can see is her pain and my own guilt. That I didn't stop it sooner.

They are not professional photographs. They were taken by the nurses. Some have comic, cartoon borders around them of the sort that you would get on a free CD given away with your printer. I don't know why they felt the need to add these. Perhaps they thought she would live. That one day I would look back and wonder at her smallness, her bruised skin.

The nurse looking after Georgina on the day she died, Georgina was the first death on her watch.
Perhaps even she didn't quite realise that babies sometimes die.

The beginnings of a diary I kept for Georgina, when we still thought she would live. My handwriting gets smaller and smaller as those three day pass, as the realisation dawns.

A man's T-shirt. There is a blood stain on the chest.
A woman's striped top.

Neither of these will ever be washed or worn again.

Why am I keeping these items? For Jessica to carry around with her after I'm dead? I really don't know.

Apart from one.

Ashes. In a plastic bag marked with a label.
Baby Georgina Jane W-----

I asked my husband if, when I die and my body is cremated, he would mix my ashes with Georgina's and then scatter them.
So I can be with her one final time.
So what remains of me and my daughter, our skins, our internal organs, our hair, will intermingle.
Just once more.

If anything remains of me on that day, it will sigh a tiny sigh. Of relief. Of release.
I miss her so.

What are you keeping? Why?