Community butterfly release returns to Coeur d’Alene memorial garden

A Coeur d’Alene memorial garden shaped by personal loss will host another butterfly release next Tuesday, giving families a place to gather, remember and turn grief into a shared ritual. The annual gathering has grown out of Auburn Crest Hospice public historian Sara Jane Ruggles’ own mourning and a five-year effort to make remembrance more thoughtful, humane and lasting.

The Memorial Butterfly Release will begin at 5:30 p.m. June 23 at Share Hope Memorial Garden, at Eighth Street and Gilbert Avenue. The event, presented in partnership with Auburn Crest Hospice, will include refreshments and remembrance activities and is intended for families to remember children, whatever age, gone too soon.

Ruggles said the idea took shape after she joined Auburn Crest Hospice in 2020 and started looking for a more ethical way to create a memorial event. She cold-called Stephen Cook, head of the University of Idaho Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology and Nematology and professor of entomology, to ask whether graduate students could help source butterflies humanely. That outreach became the foundation for the release, which will return for a fifth year.

University of Idaho graduate students have raised Painted Lady butterflies in the lab for the release. In 2024, those butterflies arrived in Moscow as caterpillars in May and were raised in Cook’s lab before being brought to Coeur d’Alene. The university department says its work supports education, research and extension as part of the land-grant mission.

The setting itself is central to the gathering’s meaning. Share Hope Memorial Garden is about one acre and was gifted in 2014 to the Northwest Infant Survival & SIDS Alliance. Healing Together says the site was originally known as Bestland Cemetery and later as Hope Cemetery. The garden includes memorial benches, a brick-paver walkway, memorial bricks and an angel statue carved by a local artist, all under old pine trees and native plantings.

The release has become a place for families to mark losses that can otherwise feel isolating. About 100 people attended the third annual release in 2024. Christina Volk came that year to remember her mother, Joanne Porcello. In 2025, Darina Reyes attended with her sons, Asaiah Reyes and Azariah Reyes, to honor her husband and their father, Alex Reyes, while other families wrote notes on dissolvable paper and placed them in a flower-filled basin.

For Ruggles, early May can be especially difficult because it marks the anniversary of losing her son during pregnancy. She said butterflies seemed to appear everywhere that week, a reminder of why the memorial should center on them. At Share Hope Memorial Garden, that idea has become a steady local tradition, linking hospice care, the university and grieving families in one visible place of healing.