Making arrangments

I'm starting to get all my ducks in a row for our vacation. We'll be gone just over a week. Duffy's sister is getting married, and after we fulfill our obligations, we are off the the capitol with the girls for our first family vacation since the summer of 2006. I type that and think, "holy crap! How can it possibly have been that long?" But it was.
I am doing laundry and getting activity bags ready. Once softball is over, I can clean out the car. I'm lining up dog watchers, and cleaning like a mad woman. We bought rid-x to clean out the sewage lines while we are gone. We are PREPARED!!!
What I never thought I'd be thinking about, is having someone water the flowers at my daughter's grave. I asked my best friend to make sure that her flower baskets are taken care of. Seems strange. Seems wrong. Oh wait, it is. I ended that particular phone call, and sat down on the couch for a while thinking about the wrongness of making such arrangements.
And then I got mad all over again. I am still so angry, that I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever not be angry. Will I ever stop hating people who are bad parents? When that horrible woman comes into my place of business to have supervised visitation with her son, because she's made such horrible choices as a mother that she can't see him without being supervised, will I stop wanting to choke her til she gets some sense? I don't know, if I'm not mad, what will I be then? In the quiet moments when I visit her and I'm not angry, I feel so sad, I want to lay down with her and forget everything else. When I'm alone, and I'm sad, and there isn't anyone around to keep me up, I feel so empty, that the ache is physical, and I feel hollow. Still, 402 days later. Still, more than a year without her. I have been without her longer than I knew her. Still, I'm incomplete. Still I'm mad, and sad, and hurt, and lost. I have said often that when you grieve and you choose to keep living your life, you have to integrate your grief into your life. True, but it's beginning to feel like the other parts of my life are tainted by my grief. I used to feel joy when Maddy looked at me and smiled that megawatt smile. I used to feel, really feel, my heart lift when Abbey tucked her hand in mine, or crawled into bed and shoved her cold little feet next to my knees to get warm. And now, those feelings are buried under several layers of agony and pain, and I have to dig and reach and stretch to get my fingertips around those feelings. I miss them.
So I'll be leaving for vacation soon. I'm taking the camera and plenty of memory card space. I'm going to catch lots of freckle-faced smiling girls. I'm going to burn many new mental pictures. I'm going to have fun, and I'm going to dig until I can get my hands all the way around these days.