‘She doesn’t have to struggle anymore’
In life, Ellie Fedak hoped that people would take a kinder and less judgmental view of the plight of vulnerable and marginalized women.
“Homelessness is not about being a junkie, or like an addiction person. It is about trauma. You don’t know the things that we have gone through,” Fedak, then 34, told the Star during a visit to Sistering drop-in centre last year.
“Some are here because of violence in home life, with men, boyfriends, or rapes, or so deep in our addiction that we have nowhere to go.”
On July 30, Eleanor Fedak, whom friends called Ellie, became one of the hundreds of people recently lost to overdose and addiction in Toronto. To those who knew her, she was not just another victim. She was a mother, an animal lover, a champion tenpin bowler in her youth. She was loved.
Fedak’s funeral took place in Edmonton. She was 35.
Her death comes in the midst of a tainted drug crisis, with 303 people dying from overdoses in Toronto last year, up 63 per cent from 2016, according to Toronto Public Health.
“She was a beautiful girl and she tried hard, but she was in such a dark place,” said Fedak’s mother, Josephine Giampa, who said police told her that an overdose was the suspected cause of her daughter’s death. The cause of death will be determined by the coroner.
“That is the worst feeling in the world, when you can’t help your child. All I know is part of me is gone.”
Fedak had been a frequent guest of Sistering, a place where women can visit any time of day or night, enjoy a meal, have a shower, use computers, visit with friends and find support and safety.
There are no beds. People sleep on reclining chairs, or on mats on the floor. In a city with a severe lack of affordable housing and a chronically overfilled emergency shelter system, it is also often the only place for them to go.
The Star spent a night at Sistering in February 2017, documenting the ceaseless activity and camaraderie enjoyed by a diverse community of women, all struggling to survive in Canada’s largest and increasingly unaffordable city.
Fedak had come to the drop-in about four months earlier, because the person she was living with was battling their own drug addiction and it was threatening her recovery. She also needed to bring her chihuahua, Emilio, and Sistering allows pets.
She spoke about wanting to recover and be reunited with her two children, and wished people would try to understand the many reasons women would need to use a drop-in, including seeking out a safe place while they tried to manage their addictions.
Sistering hosted a memorial for Fedak on Aug. 15. She was remembered as a joy to be around, with a wide and easy smile, upbeat personality, keen ability to size people up, sharp sense of humour and sincere willingness to help.
Friend Angela Gibson, 54, bonded quickly with Fedak over a love of pets. “I got to know what really mattered to her,” Gibson said. “She was all about family.”
Fedak, said Gibson, was always hunting for treasures out on the street, filling five suitcases with found clothing and accessories. She had wonderful taste and her friends encouraged her to open a store, Gibson said. Neighbourhood resident Kathy Gardner, 59, met Fedak at Sistering and would let her stay at her place.
“She was a great person,” neat and tidy and polite, whose heart wasn’t hardened by the tough experiences she had, Gardner said. “In her own way, she was special.”
Despite the rising number of overdose deaths, Queen’s Park announced in mid-August that funding for three planned safe injection sites, including one in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, would be frozen pending a program review.
A day later, Toronto police released a public safety alert warning that a “batch of dangerous drugs” containing either fentanyl or carfentanil had resulted in seven people dying from overdoses during the first two weeks of the month.
Mayor John Tory called for Queen’s Park to conduct a “very expeditious” review.
“If that happened in any other context — we lost seven lives — we’d be heartbroken but also angry and deeply concerned, as I am,” Tory told reporters at city hall.
Rather than wait, the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society opened a renegade supervised consumption site in Parkdale. It is the second time the group set up in an area where use is already high in a bid to save lives.
Fedak’s life began at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, in Edmonton, on Nov. 26, 1982.
The elder of two, she was determined and brave, loved the colour purple and animals, and had a real gift for speaking with strangers, particularly seniors.
“She was always smiling. She was always highly spirited and stubborn,” her mother said. “She fought me in everything, and I mean everything.”
Giampa wanted her daughter to become a dancer, but said Fedak set her sights on tenpin bowling at the age of 4.
“Can you imagine a 4-year-old with a tenpin ball?” Giampa said.
Fedak earned the title of Alberta provincial champion more than once and represented the province at the national championships in the youth category. She won silver in the bantam girls all-events division in 1995, online records show, and her mother said she went on to compete in the United States.
While her skill and focus brought her success in that arena, Fedak struggled when it came to her mental health, her mother said.
Her recreational drug use started in her late teens, but it wasn’t until before her father’s death in 2016 that she “spiralled,” Giampa said.
Fedak’s family flew her body back to Edmonton, where she was cremated in a purple dress that belonged to her mother but had never been worn. Her family asked that people donate in her name to the Alberta division of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
Her mother hopes to find Emilio, to make sure the dog ends up with their family.
“She doesn’t have to struggle anymore,” Giampa said of her daughter. “She is not in a bad place at all. She is resting in peace.”