Healing with Butterflies
July 16, 2025
University of Idaho entomology Professor Stephen Cook and the students who work in his laboratory rear butterflies to provide solace for grieving families.
During each of the past four years, Cook, head of the Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology and Nematology (EPPN), and his laboratory workers have raised between 100 and 150 native painted lady butterflies to be released during a ceremony at the Share Hope Memorial Garden in Coeur d’Alene. In many cultures, including Native American lore and Norse mythology, butterflies are revered as couriers capable of delivering messages from the living to the spiritual realm.
Auburn Crest Hospice in Coeur d’Alene and the Northwest Infant Survival and SIDS Alliance (NISSA), which manages the memorial garden, invite bereaved friends and families they’ve served to attend the ceremony. The event includes a nondenominational service featuring words from an Auburn Crest chaplain, and a singer performs “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” before butterflies are released.
A local bakery serves butterfly-shaped sugar cookies, and an area florist contributes assorted flowers, which lure many of the butterflies once the mesh insect cages holding them are opened. Participants are invited to write messages to departed loved ones on rice-starch paper. Their private notes are placed into a small pool and quickly dissolve. Artificial lily pads float atop the pool’s surface. Some of the butterflies briefly land on the lily pads before shepherding heart-felt communications into the unknown.
About 150 people gathered at the garden for the most recent release, hosted on June 24.
“We have had people come up and hug us and tell us it provided some closure,” Cook said. “If they did not have a chance to say goodbye as they feel would have been the appropriate way, it gives them the chance to say that last goodbye, and we’ve had multiple people tell us that.”
Cook and his team spent about six weeks raising the painted ladies from commercially purchased eggs, to caterpillars, to chrysalises to butterflies. Butterflies can live for up to two months in the adult stage with proper nutrition.
All five students in Cook’s lab this year volunteered to help raise the butterflies on their own time. In addition to participating in community service, the students got to hone their research skills, comparing health outcomes of insects fed diets of sugar water, energy drinks and juice from whole fruit. The students concluded butterflies that consumed fruit juice fared the best.
“Several of us had fruit with our lunches and put the leftover piece in for the butterflies,” Cook said. “We used apricots one week.”
Sara Jane Ruggles, who documents patient histories as the Auburn Crest staff historian, proposed the concept of a butterfly release to Cook.
Ruggles experienced a miscarriage in 2013, and even after seven years, the grief never subsided. One afternoon around the anniversary of her loss, while she was reflecting in the Share Hope Memorial Garden, she encountered a butterfly that seemed to want to play with her.
“I had this lightning idea: ‘We need to start releasing butterflies,’” Ruggles recalled.
She contacted U of I entomologists seeking guidance and help. Cook, who was coping with the recent loss of a close friend to COVID-19 and shared Ruggles’ strong feelings in support of Hospice, agreed to help immediately.
The first two people who arrived for the inaugural release affirmed the importance of the event to Ruggles. An 8-year-old girl whose father had just died in a car accident saw a notice about the event in a local newspaper and asked her mother to take her. The girl spent the next half hour carefully crafting the right words to send to her departed father.
Attendance at the release has grown steadily since the first year, when about 45 people attended.
“You know how powerful this is the moment you see it,” Ruggles said. “This is the first time you’re actually talking to them, writing their name down and writing a letter like they are here. You feel the hair on the back of your neck stand.
“And you drop your message in the water and immediately afterward the butterflies are released. You watch them land on a flower and warm up their wings for a little bit and take off, and you just feel. ‘You, butterfly, are the messenger.’”
About the University of Idaho
The University of Idaho, home of the Vandals, is Idaho’s land-grant, national research university. From its residential campus in Moscow, U of I serves the state of Idaho through educational centers in Boise, Coeur d’Alene and Idaho Falls, nine research and Extension centers, plus Extension offices in 42 counties. Home to more than 12,000 students statewide, U of I is a leader in student-centered learning and excels at interdisciplinary research, service to businesses and communities, and in advancing diversity, citizenship and global outreach. U of I competes in the Big Sky and Western Athletic conferences. Learn more at uidaho.edu.