Exactly three years ago, on the morning of Dec. 10, 2005, a police officer knocked on the door of couple Jodie and Melissa Virago's Catonsville house. The two had moved in only days before.

The officer gave them a vague message to call a friend in Greencastle, Pa., where Jodie's parents lived and where the two women's 6-year-old son, Elijah, was staying for the weekend. The officer said there had been a fire.

Melissa called the friend, who told Melissa to call Jodie's aunt, who also lived in Greencastle.

Jodie called her aunt, who delivered a devastating message: Jodie's parents, Joseph and Joan Bowser, and Elijah had all been killed in an electrical fire that had also destroyed the house.

The couple drove to Greencastle in shock. When they got there, firefighters told them nothing could be saved from the house.

Jodie couldn't move. Melissa ducked under the police tape and began digging through the ashes, saving hundreds of pictures and Jodie's baby book in the process.

A week later, the couple found their two cats, Medie and Woolfie, who had been in the house at the time of the fire but had survived.

But the couple had lost what was dearest to them -- their "smart, eloquent" son and "the best grandparents in the world."

Shock and grief swallowed them.

"I wasn't tuned in to the rest of the world," Melissa said.

"Like when your ears are filled with water," Jodie said. "That's what my brain felt like."

The shock was a blessing, Jodie said. It allowed them to get through the week, sign the paper to have their son cremated, eat meals friends prepared for them, breathe. None of it would have been possible, they said, without the shock.

The grief remains and will never go away, they said.

But they have begun a journey toward coping with the tragedy, part of which began at Elijah's memorial service when Jodie was handed information about the Compassionate Friends Greater Baltimore Chapter, a group for parents who have lost children and for those who have lost a sibling.

At first, the idea of attending a meeting of the group was hard to grasp, Melissa said.

"It's this huge, underground club that nobody wants to be a part of, but all of a sudden, you're made a member," she said.

The group allowed the couple to meet parents who have experienced similar tragedies, who could, to some extent, relate to what they were feeling, and that helped, they said.

"The meetings themselves were not as important as the relationships we made at the meetings," Jodie said.

According to Mary LeSueur, who helped found the group in the late 1980s after her 4-month-old son died from congenital heart failure and who is now a bereavement counselor at the Center for Infant & Child Loss, the holidays are a time when such losses are particularly devastating -- no matter when they occurred.

"I get more phone calls from people I haven't heard from in a long time" during the holidays, she said. "They often can't verbalize that it is the holidays that have thrown them for a loop, but that's often what it is."

The Viragos said that is true for them.

"School-supply shopping (in August) is when it all starts for us," said Jodie, who is a teacher at Sudbrook Magnet Middle School near Pikesville. "It sort of sets this bad season."

Then comes Elijah's birthday, on Sept. 21. October brings Halloween, the holiday they always had the most fun preparing for. In November, comes Thanksgiving, the last holiday they spent with Elijah. December brings the anniversary of the fire. And then Christmas.

After Elijah's death, the couple didn't celebrate holidays until last year, they said, when their daughter Olivia, who is 14 months old, gave them new reason to.

Today, the couple are busy parents again. Toys are all around their Catonsville apartment. They point to pictures of Elijah, which dot the walls, and tell Olivia about her brother. They are devastated by the fact that Olivia won't have her grandparents to watch over her.

Although their grief will never leave them, Jodie and Melissa said they are happy they found Compassionate Friends.

The group is holding a candle-lighting with the Center for Infant & Child Loss on Dec. 14 at the Brown Memorial Church in Towson. Please e-mail info@baltimoretcf.com.

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