Before We Made Death a Business
A Founder's Letter by Suzanne Gwynn, RN (Retired)
Before medicine became sterile, the doctor came to the house. Or the midwife. Neighbors brought food, firewood, helped with the harvest, put on a roof. Coffins were built with love, not purchased on credit. Graves were sacred spaces, not places to abandon, but places to return to, to remember.
There were rituals. Bodies were bathed and wrapped with care. Fresh flowers. Wreaths on doors. Mirrors covered. Last homecomings. People mourned loudly and publicly. They wore black. They sat together. They didn't apologize for their grief.
Death belonged to the community.
Now it makes people uncomfortable.
We are given 72 hours to grieve someone we loved for decades. Five days if we have to travel. Dying has become a transaction. A business. Something managed by professionals in buildings designed for efficiency, not for love.
We lost something real. Not just a practice, but a way of being human together.
Ladybug House is an attempt to take it back.
Not to abandon medicine. Medicine saves lives and medicine matters. But when saving is no longer the work, something else must take its place. Presence. Closeness. The simple grace of not being separated from the people you love at the moment it matters most.
A child. A spouse. A mother in her 90s. A best friend. It doesn't matter. The need is the same. To not face it alone. To be held, or simply to be near.
That is not a medical need. That is a human one.
Families don't want a break from their dying loved ones. They want to live alongside them. In whatever way they are capable of in that moment. For some that means sitting quietly, reading aloud, holding a hand. For others it means physical care. For others it means simply lying down beside the person they love and breathing the same air.
That is not caregiving. That is love. And it looks like community.
I had to start somewhere. I started with children, because that is where I stood for thirty-five years. At the bedside of small patients and the families who refused to leave them.
Ladybug House is my beginning. But does there have to be an end?
Every community deserves a space like this. For every age. For every kind of love and every kind of loss. A place where dying is not managed or hidden or rushed, but honored.
How do we return dying to the circle of life?
It starts here.
Suzanne Gwynn, RN (Retired)
Founder, Ladybug House