Metro

Mom who lost family to fire now picking up the pieces

Life — and family — are beginning anew for Madonna Badger, the Stamford, Connecticut mom who lost her three daughters and her parents in a Christmas fire in 2011.

In a heart-wrenching new personal memoir in Vogue, the 49-year-old Manhattan ad exec reveals she is engaged to be married in September, the latest step in her remarkable journey through and then beyond her unimaginable grief.

“It’s never going to be easy,” writes Badger, who is engaged to marry a longtime friend, Bill Duke, a real estate broker, with whom she’ll be volunteering this Christmas to help kids in need.

“The pain is just so huge that sometimes it feels like a prison cell,” she writes.

“But trying really hard to not feel sorry for myself makes me feel good. Being of service helps the pain to go away, if only for a little while, and giving and receiving love makes me feel good. Basically, I go to wherever the light is, because anything else is darkness, and it can be a deeply black darkness.”

She recalls in the piece how the tragedy began, with her standing in billowing smoke on the scaffolding of her under-renovation Victorian home.

“The smoke hit me so hard I almost fell over,” she remembers.

“I kept trying to put my head in—I tried again and again to hold my breath—but I couldn’t get in,” she said of standing outside the third-floor bedroom windows of her daughters Lily, 9, and Sarah and Grace, who were 7-year-old twins.

“The fire was just so intense. I think we all have this idea that we’d turn into some kind of Superwoman in situations like this—you know, we’ll get in there by any means possible, no matter how hot the fire or how thick the smoke. But I couldn’t breathe.”

There on that scaffolding, she writes, began what will likely be a lifetime of regret.

“Even today, I wake up most mornings and I’m back there trying to figure out how to save everybody, or thinking about what I could have done differently,” she says.

“Why didn’t I climb into bed with my kids? Why didn’t I check on them in the night? Why didn’t I smell the smoke? Why did I choose that house?”

Next she was in the hospital, her mouth, face and upper body all black from smoke, screaming again, “Where are my children? Where are my parents?”

“I’ve never felt so desperate,” she said of lying in the ER, alternately screaming and knocked out on sedatives, until a doctor came in and said, “Your children are dead— and your mother and father are dead, too.”

After the funeral, attended at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue by clients Calvin Klein and Vera Wang, came brushes with suicide and repeated psych institutionalizations.

She tried antique selling with pals in Little Rock, she writes, and almost committed to a career in antiques sales, until she realized she was

Clarity — a lifting of the choking smoke of grief and regret that still darkened her life — only came a year after the tragedy when she went to work with another friend at an orphanage for girls in Thailand, where she spent her first Christmas, a year later, without her three little girls, mom and dad.

There, among children who had survived great personal tragedies, yet were filled with joy, she learned to stop feeling sorry for herself, and to stop blaming herself, she writes.

When she handed the Thai girls her own daughters’ outgrown toys and clothing — which had been stowed in the garage behind the house in Stamford — the little girls “came and stood in front of me and prayed for me in Thai.

“I closed my eyes, and when I opened them we were all crying. When I looked into the girls’ faces, I saw my children. It broke me open in a way I still can’t fully explain.

“But if these little girls were living their lives with joy and happiness, I realized—and if they could give their love to me after all they had been through—how could I possibly feel sorry for myself?” she asks.

“What they showed me was that what had happened to them had just happened. It wasn’t “done” to them, just as none of this had been “done” to me. I wasn’t being punished; I had not been singled out.”

Her ex-husband, Matthew, the girls’ father, “has been very loving and kind, and he’s doing an amazing job with the foundation he’s created in the name of our children, the LilySarahGraceFund, to help teachers help children by bringing more art into public school systems,” she writes.

She’s back at work.

“Calvin told me early on that work and my company would help me,” she writes. “And he was right.”

She adds, “I’m also still a mom, and I’m still my parents’ daughter,” she writes. “Just because they’re all gone doesn’t mean that any of that stops, and what better way to honor their lives than to not give up?