Metro

Mom gives brave eulogy for girls killed in Christmas fire

UNITED IN SORROW: Grieving parents Matthew and Madonna Badger stand together yesterday, despite their estranged relationship, as her boyfriend, Mike Borcina, offers emotional support. Madonna and Borcina were the Christmas fire's only survivors.

UNITED IN SORROW: Grieving parents Matthew and Madonna Badger stand together yesterday, despite their estranged relationship, as her boyfriend, Mike Borcina, offers emotional support. Madonna and Borcina were the Christmas fire’s only survivors. (David McGlynn)

Impossibly brave Manhattan ad exec Madonna Badger fought through tears and unfathomable grief yesterday to deliver a moving eulogy for her three young daughters lost in a horrific Christmas fire.

“They left the world at such tender ages that all they left behind was love,” Badger told the hundreds of sobbing mourners who crowded Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue for a “Service of Thanksgiving” celebrating the lives of Lily Badger, 9, and her twin sisters, Sarah and Grace, 7.

The little girls and their grandparents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson, were killed in a blaze that swept through Badger’s Stamford, Conn., Victorian home early Christmas Day.

READ THE EULOGY

“This is going to be really hard,” Badger began. “Lily, Gracie and Sarah are not here with us today, and they won’t be here tomorrow . . . but my little girls are not gone from us entirely.

“My girls are in my heart,” she said, placing her hand on her chest. “They’re right here. This is where they live now.”

As she spoke, mourners — who included many of the girls’ school friends — sobbed openly.

Dozens of Stamford firefighters, who had tried in vain to save the children, could not hold back their own tears.

Glancing toward the girls’ tiny mahogany coffins — each bearing a wreath of pink and white flowers — their mother stoically continued. “I want you to remember my girls out loud, to fight for them never to be forgotten,” Badger said. “This is why I can stand before you today.”

The Badger children and their grandparents died after a bag of live fireplace embers — which Badger’s contractor boyfriend, Mike Borcina, placed in a trash area attached to the house — ignited, investigators have said.

The ashes had been taken out of the fireplace so that the kids wouldn’t worry about Santa’s safety as he came down the chimney Christmas Eve.

Badger and Borcina were the only ones in the house to escape.

Yesterday, Badger spoke for 20 minutes, pausing frequently to compose herself.

“Why did this happen to my parents and my children, and why now? Nothing will bring my babies back,” she said through tears.

She shared what she called “the smallest drops in an ocean of memories” of the children she fondly called “my little girl tribe.”

She spoke of each child individually, recalling tidbits about their personalities.

Firstborn Lily, she said, “was my angel and my life,” a little girl with a glowing smile who loved to dance and “sang before she spoke.”

Sarah was the care giver, the “little whippersnapper” with “a fragile heart,” who watched over and worried about her mom.

And Gracie was the adventurer, the fearless one who would pick up bugs and “loved completely.”

Badger also recalled how Grace and Lily would ask her about death and dying.

Lily, she said, “begged me to tell her when she would die . . . I told her life is a total mystery and we’ll never know when we die. She accepted that — I will, too.

“Gracie asked me a thousand times if she was going to die before me, and I said, ‘No, Gracie, no that’s never going to happen.’

“But that happened,” the heartsick mom said.

The girls’ inconsolable father, Matthew Badger, who awoke in his Manhattan apartment Christmas morning to learn he’d never see his babies again, was too overcome to speak at the service. Instead, he wrote reflections on each daughter, which were read aloud by the Rev. William S. Shillady.

“He wanted you to know he loved his children,’’ Shillady said.

In one poignant passage about Lily, her dad recalled, “She always wanted a grown-up near her at night, and in the end, she was right.’’

Calvin Klein, Vera Wang, Lou Reed and Philip Seymour Hoffman were among those who came to pay their respects.

Guests were given a program featuring a photo of the three smiling sisters, laughing and wearing dresses, their hair tousled, with their birth and death dates: Lilian Elizabeth Badger, Aug. 29, 2002-Dec. 25, 2011; Sarah Hudson Badger, Oct. 15, 2004-Dec. 25, 2011, and Grace McCarthy Badger, Oct. 15, 2004-Dec. 25, 2011.

Folk singer Rufus Wainwright sang a stirring, a capella rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Madonna Badger, holding on tightly to Matthew, wailed as the estranged couple left the church behind their daughters’ caskets, which were carried by a squad of 18 Stamford firefighters.

Madonna’s boyfriend, Borcina, and Matthew’s girlfriend, Abby Bellin, followed behind.

Stamford Mayor Michael Pavia told The Post, “Since the fire, it has been a series of unbelievables, unbearables and incredibles, and the fact that this kind of tragedy occurred left a lot of people just numb.

“At the funeral today, I saw something unbelievable. I saw Madonna Badger stand up in her pew, walk to the pulpit and give a eulogy on her three daughters. And what she did — she actually gave everyone in the church a gift, an insight into each of her three little girls.

“And she did it with such dignity and such class,” Pavia said.

After the service, the Badger girls were buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx in a high-security, family-only ceremony.

Additional reporting by Dan Mangan and Corrie Thomas