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Twenty seven years ago I buried my three children on a cold March day in Vermont. Along with their housekeeper they died of smoke inhalation from an early morning fire. At age 33 my life as a mother and wife ended. I spent five years in therapy talking mostly about issues not related to the fire but about my own insecurities. How would I go on? What would I do? How would I take care of myself? The less talked about were the existential questions of “why?”  Why did my children die? Why not me instead?

Slowly I carved out a new life that included graduate school, writing books on grief and time with my dear parents in their last years. My Father who had Cerebral Palsy and taught college for 50 years was my mentor through graduate school. He read every book I read and deserved the degree as much as I did. My Mother, a homemaker, had polio as a teenager and became a registered nurse in her early career. She told me stories about my children that I always loved hearing. Through these years, with lots of Grace from God, my life began to heal.

I made a deliberate decision as I entered graduate school to focus my academic studies on disability policy and educational leadership and not bereavement studies. My dissertation argued for entitlement for adults with developmental disabilities in Vermont.  Vermont’s Constitution’s 1777 Mental Defective Clause states that the “care of Persons and Estate of those who were “non compos mentis” (not of sound mind) and without family were to be cared for by the local selectmen or Legislature.”  I argued that for 156 years that obligation was not met.  While at the University of Vermont College of Education I applied for the Joseph P. Kennedy Fellowship to work in the Congress on behalf of welfare and disability. I was awarded the fellowship and worked in the office of Senator Rockefeller and never looked back. Upon completing the year long fellowship I joined the National Disability Institute (NDI) that at that time was a program under the National Cooperative Bank Development Corporation in Washington, DC.

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