A hospice that acts as a home away from home for those near the end of life, Jessica’s House in Exeter, Ont., is named after University of Guelph alumna Jessica Marie Hamather (B.Sc. ’15). The 22-year-old died in late 2015 from a rare form of cancer.
Intended as a place of compassion, dignity and respect that would honour Hamather’s memory, Jessica’s House opened this past June as a three-bedroom residential hospice to provide palliative care. Health-care officials recognized a longstanding need for residential hospice beds in Huron County, where Jessica was born and raised.
A two-year fundraising campaign collected $3 million for the building.
Construction on the South Huron Hospital Foundation project began in summer 2017, and the facility opened a year later on land in south Exeter donated by a local family.
Jessica’s mother, Maria Hamather, co-chaired the steering committee for the project. She said as the project took shape that her daughter “would have loved this wonderful and peaceful place.”