Madonna Badger--the woman who lost all three of her children and her own parents in a Christmas day fire in 2011--has a great update in November 2013. She’s engaged.
Badger’s story caught national attention because of the sudden and shocking loss. When the tragedy happened, Badger was a top advertising executive. She was living in Stamford, Conn. and had good relationships with both her ex-husband and a contractor who she had gotten romantically involved with.
But the death of five of her family members nearly drove her to suicide, she told Vogue in a recent interview. Only through seeking help from an old friend, which involved moving to Little Rock, Arkansas, was she able to make it through. She began seeing a specialist at the Psychiatric Research Institute at the University of Arkansas, and helping her friend look for things to sell in a warehouse space filled with rugs and antiques and china.
“Every day was an actual treasure trove. But more important, as I spent day upon day going through box upon box looking for beautiful objects, two things happened,” she told Vogue. “One, I had to stay in the present moment. It’s hard to go too far down one road or another when you’re using your hands and your eyes and your brain so intently. The second thing was that as we found old photographs, I was forced to reckon with loss, with transience.
“I came to understand and be at peace with the notion that the people in the pictures I was looking at were all gone now—that the little girl in 1905 who owned the doll I was holding in my hands was dead; that all this stuff was really just the ephemera that gets left behind. There was really no judgment about it.”
Badger ended up moving back to the New York area and re-joining the company she was working for. She called Bill Duke, a real estate broker who was by her side when she woke up after the fire, for help finding a house. Duke asked her out and later asked her to marry him.
“We’re getting married next September; more immediately, we’re volunteering together this Christmas to help kids in need,” she said.
“Earlier this fall I walked from Bill’s house in Brooklyn to Green-Wood Cemetery to find a place to bury the ashes of my daughters. I kept thinking that I should have been taking them to their first day of school, or having a parent-teacher conference, but after almost two years, I was ready for them to have a final resting place. Once I came to terms with that, I felt strangely peaceful, though facing the physicality of that place is really, really hard. At a certain point, you can either be full of hate or full of love—it can go either way. I have no hate in my heart, no bitterness, and I am blessed by this.
“I found a beautiful spot for them, up on a hill. And I can feel my girls and my parents with me every day. This gives me immeasurable hope.”
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