Even after her husband’s brain injury and a house fire, Danielle Sugar believes she and her family are among “the luckiest people.”
The mother of three has seen her life dramatically uprooted on multiple occasions during the past 16 months, most recently on the evening of Oct. 3 when a fire broke out in their Aurora townhouse, which they had been renting for eight years.
While she and her children safely left the house, and the fire was extinguished by Central York Fire Services, the family lost almost all of their belongings, aside from a few family photos.
“The smell — you could smell it from the road, it was so potent,” she said. “I expected what I saw, I didn’t go there thinking I was going to be able to salvage anything. The walls were completely black.”
The destructive episode came just a little more than a year after Danielle’s husband, Russell, suffered a major brain injury.
‘My greatest fear’
On June 23, 2023, Russell, then 41, had a cardiac incident while on his morning walk. After several weeks in the intensive care unit, Russell was alive but had severe brain damage.
Sugar said nobody could have seen the “freak accident” coming for Russell, who was a healthy, active man, who enjoyed playing basketball.
He now lives in a long-term care facility in King, leaving Sugar, who works as a counsellor at Pickering College in Newmarket, having to cover the more than $2,000 monthly cost of his care.
Sugar said the emotional toll of her husband’s health problems “put life into perspective,” and in a way prepared her for the house fire that destroyed much of their worldly possessions.
“People can’t be replaced, but things can,” she said.
Sugar said while there was “so much chaos,” on the evening of the fire, her children were keen to go back to school, and Sugar herself was soon back to work herself.
Among the upheaval, Sugar has found time to complete her master’s degree in psychotherapy, which she was studying for before her husband’s accident.
Sugar said she’s learned a lot about grief and loss from her recent experiences, which she feels has aided her in her work as a counsellor.
“I think grief and trauma for most people is very terrifying,” she said. “If they haven’t gone through it themselves, the idea of death, the idea of loss, is so overwhelming, they don’t even want to talk about it, acknowledge it.”
“That was very much me,” she said. “I had never been in a situation like this before, it was my greatest fear.”
“I don’t fear grief and loss in the same way as I did before. It’s still an awful feeling, but I understand it better.”
Returning to normalcy
While the children are back at school and Sugar is back working, the family has not yet found a new home. Sugar is trying to avoid having her kids change schools, and is staying with her parents in the meantime.
“I think what I’ve learned, and my kids have taught me, is how important it is to get back into normal,” she said. “It isn’t normal what’s happened to us.”
In the wake of the fire, a family friend set up a GoFundMe fundraiser to help the family get back on their feet. The fundraiser has raised more than $37,000 of its $40,000 goal, as of writing.
“Really going through two of these things back to back is awful, but we also saw so much beauty in humanity too. I think we’re in many ways, the luckiest people too.”
More information about the family’s GoFundMe can be found online.
