The Healing Journey

May 22, 2024

“A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings.”
– Mandy Hale

When Nancy was a baby, her father Paul painted a large monarch butterfly on the wall of her bedroom. It was orange and black, and the branches and tree were painted gold. “I was just a baby,” she said, “but through the years, my parents would give me cards and trinkets with butterflies. I have always loved looking at them and enjoy taking pictures of them.”

“A number of years ago, I decorated my guest room, painting the walls a marshmallow peach, and I found a beautiful white bedspread with peach and gold butterflies on it, along with other butterfly accessories,” she said. “I had told my dad we would paint a canvas together for the big wall behind the bed. But it didn’t happen.”

Her beloved father died in 2021.

Before Paul passed, Nancy found a monarch butterfly that had been injured and couldn’t move on the garden wall. She put it in a little box, and when her father died, she wrote him a letter about how much he meant to her and placed it and the butterfly with him.

Last summer, Nancy and her son Thomas planted a butterfly bush in their garden in honor of her father Paul.

Each year, millions of monarch butterflies in North America migrate thousands of miles to Florida and Mexico.

Monarch butterflies are a symbol of hope and transformation and rebirth because of the different life cycles — from larva to caterpillar to chrysalis and finally a beautiful butterfly. They are often released at Hospices and memorial services..

For thousands of years, different cultures, including the Aztec, Irish, Egyptian and Greek, believed the souls of their departed return as butterflies.

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