Ladybird is a registered nurse, clinical social worker, registered craniosacral therapist practitioner and co-founder of The Humane Prison Hospice Project. She has 20+ years’ experience in hospice and palliative care, addressing trauma, mental health challenges and repercussions of sexual violence. Ladybird also co-facilitates Commonweal’s Cancer Care Help Program: Healing Circles, UCSF’s MERI Centre’s Last Acts of Kindness and is a study therapist with a University of Washington study of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy.

In this evolving conversation, Ladybird invites caregivers to consider how we may approach caring for grieving people from a place of companionship rather than one of mastery. By making space for not knowing (both within and between people) we may offer companionship in grief, even as a relative or patient’s own grief experience may be deeply personal to them. Ladybird also invites us to consider our lives as a fundamentally relational endeavour. From this perspective of coexisting in a shared relational field – we may then be able to explore gentle acts of re-connection during grief – to our own bodies, to other people, and also more broadly to other parts of the vast relational field in which we all exist (think: plants, animals, earth, ecology).