Kathy Peters always told her son that he was not to get engaged until he found a girl that he loved as much as his mother loved him.

Deryk Michael Peters had just returned from four years in the Navy. It was Christmas Eve when Deryk made the announcement: He found the girl he loved and would marry, Cherie Brennan.

One month later, on Jan. 28, 1999, six days shy of his 24th birthday, Deryk and Cherie died in a house fire, four houses up the road from where his mom, dad and two sisters lived in Canton.

“We still think of him every day,” said Kathy Peters, now of Sumner. Peters copes by sharing. “You want people to remember him,” said Peters of the son she had borne when she was just 17 years old. “It’s still nice to hear his name.”

Kathy Peters and her son’s fiancée were planning his surprise birthday party the night before he died. The next morning she was making pancakes while her daughters were getting ready for school. She remembers hearing the fire whistle blow. It must be a big fire, she thought, since the fire whistle hardly ever sounded.

Then a friend wearing only a night gown on that cold winter day pulled up crying, and told Peters that the burning house belonged to her son.

Jan. 28 will mark a decade since the couple died. “You don’t think that a minute will go by and the next thing you know it has been 10 years,” Peters said. “You’re not supposed to lose your child, no matter what age they are. When you’re a mom, you fix things, and there was no fixing this.”

Six months went by before Peters reached out for help. “You slowly crawl your way out of the abyss that you’re in. Then you start to move,” she said. She had two teenage daughters who needed their mother, and “my 16-year-old was parenting me.” When she realized what was happening to her girls, Peters began to look to others for guidance.

“Run, don’t walk, to a Compassionate Friends group” was the first advice Peters followed. Compassionate Friends is a worldwide support group that assists families following the death of a child. Maine did not have a chapter, so Peters started one, and has been the Lewiston-based group’s leader for eight years.

After Deryk’s death, Peters said she received at least 200 sympathy cards, some from people she didn’t know. Peters recalls a card from a Rumford women who also lost a child in a house fire. “She wrote that ‘despite how you feel, you will someday laugh again.’ That one card gave me that little pin prick of light at the end of the tunnel. That one glimmer of hope. I like to think that I am that glimmer of hope to people in my (Compassionate Friends) group.”

Two years after the fire, Peters realized that life indeed would go on.

“After two, two and a half years, I would catch myself singing. ‘What?'” Peters would ask herself. “How can I be singing? My child is dead.”

Peters has videos of her son that she hasn’t been able to watch over the past 10 years. She still holds his ashes and has no intention of burying him.

“I can’t bury him. I will mix his ashes with mine when I die.”

But on Jan. 28, Peters will celebrate Deryk’s life and videotape family members telling stories about her only son.

“All those stories will die if we don’t record them … record them so the grandchildren will know the Deryk they never knew.”