Madonna Badger Mourns Her Children On Christmas Fire Anniversary, 'I Don't Know Why I Survived'
Dec. 26 2012, Published 9:00 a.m. ET
By Debbie Emery - Breaking Celebrity News Reporter
It has been a year since a deadly Christmas Day blaze destroyed Madonna Badger's Connecticut home and took the lives of her children and parents, and now the mourning mother is opening up about how she fell apart in the wake of the tragedy.
"I remember coiling up into a little ball, and I looked at the nurse," the fashion executive told the Stamford Advocate about the nightmarish moment that the doctors revealed the bad news. "I just wanted to crawl out of my body. I don't remember anything after that. People in the hospital said I was just screaming and wailing."
As Breaking Celebrity News previously reported, a fire sparked by yule log embers in the century-old Connecticut house killed Lily, 10; her 7-year-old twin sisters Sarah and Grace; and their grandparents Lomer and Pauline Johnson. All of the victims died from smoke inhalation, except for Lomer, who fell through the roof during a heroic effort to rescue his granddaughters.
Badger revealed how she somehow kept it together in the initial aftermath for the triple funeral of her little girls at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan, followed by a memorial in her Kentucky hometown for her parents, but then she emotionally disintegrated. Her hair turned grey and fell out in clumps, then she waved a fistful of pills in the air and threatened to swallow them, reported the Advocate.
"I told everyone I was going to kill myself," she said. "I had always wondered, imagined, thought, if anything were to happen to my kids that would be it. I don't know why I survived. But I'm imagining that I'm supposed to do something."
Instead of ultimately giving in to the grief and joining her fallen family, the New York business woman packed her bags and went to Little Rock, Arkansas, in February to stay with Vanderbilt University friend, Kate Anderson Askew