Couple Try To Restore Lives After House Fire

With 6 Deaths, Family Memories Are Ever Present

The silence can be overwhelming in the three-bedroom home. "I hate the quiet," Michelle Smith Wilson said the other night. "That's what gets to me the most."

She and her husband are renting a Northeast Washington house a couple of miles from the place that Oscar Wilson calls "the tomb" -- the charred structure where family members died in a New Year's Day fire.

The Wilsons were used to the laughter and noise created by the extended family who shared that old house on Jackson Street: their son, Oscar Wilson III, 11; their 10-year-old nephew, Joseph Wilson Jr.; the girl they raised as a daughter, Tawana Gantt, 22; Gantt's 4-year-old, Kaniya; Gantt's boyfriend, Keith Nelson, 23; and Michelle's father, Charles Smith Jr., 69.

Barely six weeks after the fire, the Wilsons gave their first extensive interview. They told how they are trying, while dealing with immeasurable grief, to get through each day. They have dealt with tragedy before -- the 2007 fatal shooting of their 17-year-old daughter, Taleshia Ford -- but nothing like this.

Michelle Wilson, 41, calls her husband her "rock," but sometimes even rocks chip.

On a living room table is a framed collage of photos of the family members who have died. Oscar Wilson said he avoids looking at it. Immediately after the fire, Wilson, 44, would dream of his family, "but then I'd wake up and realize I was dreaming again."

A few of their belongings were salvaged after the fire. Neighbors and friends pulled items out of the trash bins that city work crews used while clearing the house. Pictures, some blackened from soot, of family gatherings. Children's trophies and awards for perfect attendance, cheerleading and football. The fire melted off several of the children's names, "but we know who they belong to," Michelle Wilson said.

When they looked for a new place to stay, the Wilsons were drawn to the rental because the house has no back yard. Only a few months ago, the Wilson children and their school friends played on the swings and the trampoline the Wilsons had in their old back yard, and looking at an empty patch of grass would only add to the devastation they feel, the couple said.

"It was a playground for the neighborhood children. My house on Jackson Street was a home to everybody. This is not a home," Michelle Wilson said.

"I pray this never happens to anyone else," she said, sitting on a sofa with her head resting in her palm. "No mother, no parent should have to bury this many of their children."

Everyday tasks are tinged with trauma. For a mother who was in her nearby supermarket two or three times a week buying juice, milk, cereal and pork chops, shopping for two is difficult, especially when she sees her children's favorite cereal or snack.

"It took me three hours to shop the other day because I kept running out of the store just to go sit in my car and get myself together," she said.