On Christmas morning of 2009 Deanna Emberley Bailey and her husband, Chris Bailey ’89, suffered a tragedy that made national headlines. As the family visited Chris’ parents in Louisville, Kentucky, a fire started smoldering in the walls of the house sometime on Christmas Eve. At 4:23 Christmas morning the drywall reached its high-temperature failure point of 1,400 degrees and collapsed, filling the house with smoke and setting off fire alarms. The adults, sleeping downstairs, escaped. But the Baileys’ sons, Solon, 12, and Liam, 10, who were sleeping upstairs in the room adjacent to where experts believe the fire started, were trapped. Despite desperate attempts by their parents and firefighters, the boys died of smoke inhalation before they could be reached. 

“That was the end of life as we knew it,” Deanna says.

The Baileys’ life together began when Deanna, a lanky center defense on the women’s soccer team, sat behind quiet and focused Chris, an avid cycler, in a biology class freshman fall. They took the same chemistry class winter term and started dating in the spring. For their second date Chris invited Deanna to watch him in a Burlington, Vermont, bike race. He won.

Deanna had come to Dartmouth from Shelburne, Vermont, and Chris from Avon, Connecticut, via Deerfield Academy. After graduating—for Chris there was a three-year delay thanks to his racing professionally in Europe—the couple lived for two years in Washington, D.C., before returning to New England. They married in 1992 and pursued their careers, Chris in sustainable agriculture and Deanna in education. Solon was born while they were running a farm education center in coastal Maine, and Liam while they were managing a 100-cow dairy farm outside Burlington. The family moved to Ithaca, New York, for two years while Chris earned his M.B.A. from Cornell University. They settled down in the central Vermont town of Barre, where Deanna taught ninth-grade science and returned to playing soccer. Chris, the CEO of smokehouse Vermont Smoke and Cure, got back on his bike. The four Baileys skied and hiked together as often as possible and enjoyed telling jokes at the dinner table.

In 2008 Deanna homeschooled the boys, who had different personalities and interests. Solon played the piano and expressed his love for camping and the outdoors as a Boy Scout. Liam, who the family joked had two speeds, “intense” and “sleeping,” followed in his mother’s footsteps as a rising soccer star. He liked classic rock and played the drums. Together, the brothers, who were close, ran an egg farm from their house. 

The family visit to Kentucky for Christmas 2009 was the first in nine years, so the boys were excited to enjoy time with their relatives. On Christmas Eve Chris, Liam and a cousin played soccer, Solon played piano for his relatives and their grandfather read The Night Before Christmas. The family went to bed looking forward to the next day. 

After a memorial service in Kentucky and another  back home in Barre that drew more than 800 people, Bailey struggled daily to find her footing, going back and forth between coping and not coping, to reach solid ground. She woke up crying every day, but she got up. “I just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other,” she says. “Nothing felt good. It was just a matter of trying to do the things on any given day that would help me feel connected to the kids.”

She began working with a grief therapist who quickly became concerned that Bailey was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and recommended trauma therapy. The trauma therapist gave Bailey desensitization and reprocessing treatment (EMDR)—a widely used psychotherapy approach—to mitigate her PTSD. When she experiences symptoms, she does prescribed exercises involving eye movement and imagines herself in a sanctuary. “It keeps me from being in the fire,” Bailey says of EMDR, which she says calms her. “It keeps me from feeling constant fear.”

Erin Barnett, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Geisel School of Medicine and a PTSD specialist—who didn’t treat Bailey—says that EMDR helps synchronize the left and right sides of the brain to help integrate trauma. This helps stop intrusive thoughts and the re-experiencing of trauma through flashbacks and nightmares.

“We have to integrate and make meaning of the events to move forward,” Barnett says—which may explain why, as Bailey progressed in her treatment, her trauma therapist asked her to create something while thinking about the fire from the boys’ perspectives and to envision what happened to them afterward. It could be a piece of music, a work of art or anything that would help Bailey understand what the boys experienced and get her beyond thoughts of the fire.

Bailey avoided the exercise for two months. But one day she started writing on her laptop and didn’t stop for four hours. Writing helped her so much that she craved it for the first time in her life—math and science, not writing, were her strengths at Dartmouth, she says. Writing helped her realize that her sons died from smoke inhalation before they could experience much physical pain from the fire. Writing about her sons for several hours each day also brought her closer to them and let her remove them from danger. “It helped me give them a safe place to be,” she says.

Bailey spent the next seven months writing her vision of her sons’ afterlives: They ride eagles and travel back to their home in Barre to try to console their parents, who they see struggling to live without them. Her resulting book, Crossing the Horizon, reflects the beliefs that have guided her since her sons’ deaths: that Solon and Liam are living on, safe and happy, that they will always be connected to her and Chris, and that Solon and Liam want their parents to continue living. “I felt I had to honor my boys with my life,” she says. “They don’t want me to die.”

Bailey’s advice to anyone who loses a child draws on her own coping mechanisms: “Don’t do what doesn’t help you feel safe.”

Newbery Medal-winning author of Bridge to Terabithia Katherine Paterson, a friend of the Baileys in Barre, read an early manuscript of Crossing the Horizon and encouraged Deanna to self-publish it. “To me there was a certain urgency that it get out to the public,” says Paterson, who believes it will help others. Bailey published her book, available on Amazon.com, last February. “I am sending this out into the world for one reason only,” she wrote in her author’s note. “I want to help others who are suffering the wrenching loss of a loved one.”

While striving to simultaneously honor her sons, live in the world and take care of herself, Bailey has found new supports and set boundaries. She describes herself as a recluse that first year after the loss, trying to find solace in the outdoors.

The Baileys started the Solon and Liam Bailey Memorial Fund to support Vermont children’s access to music, soccer, conservation and literacy. Deanna took on a lot of the responsibility of running the fund early on but soon found it difficult. She loved that it helps kids have access to pursuits her sons loved, which she believes Solon and Liam would want. Yet she found it painful to not see her own sons enjoying their favorite pursuits and soon backed off. She and Chris still find it difficult to spend time with families.

Deanna couldn’t return to a traditional school setting, where fire and other alarms would trigger her PTSD, but she pursued a master’s in science education. She now works with teachers instead of children as a science curriculum specialist. “If I could, I’d rather be teaching kids,” she says. “I used to adore kids and teaching them. Just not anymore.”

When Chris’ company relocated in 2012, the Baileys moved about 45 minutes northwest to Huntington, Vermont. Deanna says she found it difficult at first to lose such a direct connection to her sons’ lives and not be able to visit their bedrooms at night, but that it helps to have more distance. When she has occasion to commute to Barre for work, she visits the schools and playgrounds her sons loved. 

Deanna has also found consolation in religion. Raised Catholic, she received her First Communion at 8, but her family stopped attending church regularly after that. She and Chris chose not to raise their sons in any particular faith, but they did talk with them about spirituality frequently, through books and in nature. 

The morning of the fire, Deanna cursed God for taking her sons. Within a few weeks she started going to church with a friend and now regularly attends an interfaith service near her home. “I can’t be yelling at [God] because my kids are with him now,” she says. In her book she writes about a “guiding spirit” who counsels Solon and Liam in their afterlives. 

“The pain will lessen over time, but it will be there,” she says. Her advice to anyone who loses a child, let alone all their children, draws on her own coping mechanisms: “Don’t do what doesn’t help you feel safe,” she says. “Don’t feel like you need to put on a happy face for the world when there’s no happiness involved. Do what works for you. And don’t put a timeline on it.”

Although the death of a child can rip families apart, Deanna says she and Chris have grown closer. “We’ve suffered the greatest loss that anyone can ever suffer as a couple. I don’t think either of us could survive without the other,” she says. They talk about the boys frequently and find hiking mountains they hiked as a family—especially Vermont’s Camel’s Hump and Mount Hunger—a spiritual experience. They maintain a cairn on one mountain in memory of the boys.

Weather permitting, Chris and Deanna try to climb Mount Hunger every Christmas morning. They strap micro-spikes onto their boots to grip the icy trail, don headlamps and try to be at the trailhead at 4:23 a.m., the time the fire alarms woke them. The four-mile hike is rated as “advanced” in local trail guides for fair conditions. When they climbed it on Christmas morning two years ago, it was 15 degrees below zero.

The Baileys watch the sun rise from the summit. Chris says he’s been known to yell into the wind his grief and frustration, but mostly he and Deanna talk to the boys and tell them how much they love and miss them.

Suzanne Spencer Rendahl is a commentator on Vermont Public Radio. She lives in Plainfield, New Hampshire.