In one moment, a family can change forever. It was a tragic reality for the Zuercher family in Summit County.
In February 2021, Katie Dougherty Zuercher was faced with making end-of-life plans for her 14-year-old daughter, Eirelyn.
The Spring Garden Waldorf School eighth-grader was critically injured in a sledding accident.
“She had just gone through a year of, you know, the pandemic, of doing school virtually and hadn’t seen her friends in a year, and they were making plans to go sledding together,” said Dougherty Zuercher. “It was going to be the first time that they were all physically in the same space after being apart for so long, and at the sledding hill she had an unfortunate accident.”
Katie Dougherty Zuercher
Eirelyn’s mother, Katie, and father, Jared, went to the hospital to check on their daughter.
“He was on his way to the hospital, somebody else was driving him and on the way up there he suffered a heart attack and by the time I got there, they had been working on him for a little while and he ended up dying of, they said it was broken heart syndrome,” said Dougherty Zuercher.