There’s something about daughters. They bounce back up as quickly as our sons, but it tears us up inside to watch them fall.
So, when someone’s little girls are looking out at us from the cover of a glossy funeral program — their smiles as bright as the winter sun — we want to go home and hug the little girls that call us Mommy and Daddy.
We look at the sad booklet, and the dates below the girls’ names, and we think of the things we own, like sweaters or scarves, that are older than the little angels.
Then we listen, with tears in our eyes, as a faithful mother named Madonna tells us how to go on.
“My little girls are not gone from us entirely,” says Madonna Badger, the heartbroken mother whose parents and three daughters — 9-year-old Lilian and 7-year-old twins Sarah and Grace — were killed in a Christmas Day fire in Connecticut.
“Because my girls are in my heart. They’re right here. And this is where they live now.”
As we hear this unimaginable grief, we look around the towering Midtown church, still decorated with Christmas wreaths, where mourners fold themselves into crowded, wooden pews.
On every row, it seems, there are little girls with ponytails or pink ribbons in their hair.
Each of them is confused about the world, their place in life, how long they have to live.
Their parents cannot help them. They are even more confused.
Still, the girls in the pews with the ribbons and the ponytails are holding a daddy’s hand or sitting on a mommy’s lap.
They each look like they’ve lost a friend. They’re little, but they know.
A family member struggles through Ecclesiastes. It is the third chapter that speaks of time and seasons.
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” he reads, before the voice cracks and fails.
“A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”
He hugs the mother. He did just fine. Another relative reads from Matthew. The chapter speaks of children.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God.”
This voice does not waver.
At the altar, just a few feet from where a choir sings “Amazing Grace,” are three gleaming coffins.
The mahogany caskets are only slightly larger than the storage boxes we used to put away our holiday decorations.
They were carried in and out of the church with pink and white wreaths by the firefighters who couldn’t save them.
Aside from the crestfallen parents, those brave men are the saddest ones there.
“Grace asked me a thousand times if she was going to die before me,” Badger tells the family, friends and strangers, each with a tissue or a knuckle to wipe their eyes.
“And I said, ‘No, Gracie, no. That is never going to happen.’ But it happened.”
Lily had asked her mom a similar question when she went with her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw all the Pieta statues of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ.
“Lily broke down on the floor and she begged me to tell her when she was going to die,” Badger says. “And I told her, after a lot of not knowing what to say, that life is a mystery, and it’s a total mystery that we will never know when we will die. And she accepted that, and I did, too.”
Badger, appropriately, is the only one from the family who speaks to the crowd. But the girls’ father, Matthew Badger, has heartwarming memories of his own.
“I often thought, ‘My, God, what a bully,’ ” he said of his strong-willed daughter Grace in a statement read by a minister at the church. “She could punch like a 9-year-old boy.”
Lily, Sarah and Grace died with their grandparents Lomer and Pauline Johnson, in a fierce, early-morning Christmas Day fire that swept through their stately Stamford home.
Authorities said the girls wanted to protect Santa from the hot fireplace embers, so the still-hot ashes were taken outside where they blew against the house and burned it down.
Badger and her contractor boyfriend, Mike Borcina, were the only ones who made it out alive.
“Everyone, including me, wonders why, why did this happen? And why my children and why my parents and why now?” Badger says days later. “But nothing will bring my babies back or my parents, or the life I had.”
You would think that anyone young enough to still believe in Santa would be too young to leave a legacy.
But Badger said Lily, Sarah and Grace — the girls with angel names — were here just long enough to teach us how to love.
“This love, I’m realizing, is to be my children’s legacy,” Badger says, “because they left the world at such tender ages that all they left behind was love.”
But even that, she says, is not enough.
“We can talk all day long about love,” Badger says. “But love without service is not enough.
“This is what will keep them alive forever.”