Three generations at Seven Ponds on the Swiss Farms, Metamora, MI

SevenPonds promotes a healthy attitude towards the process of death by encouraging a meaningful experience that is in harmony with the environment. We are a contemporary resource for those who wish to celebrate memory and personalize the end-of-life. At SevenPonds, we believe that cremation and natural burial are the new traditions.

We see a world where everyone can experience death in their own personal way and feel it's all okay.

The name SevenPonds comes from seven glacier-formed lakes, called the Seven Ponds, in Metamora, Michigan. The lakes, surrounded by soft rolling rural fields and woods dotted with oak trees, have always been special to my family.

My Swiss-born grandparents, Otto and Ida Gilomen, were two of the founders of the Swiss Farms, a summer vacation community on the shores of Seven Ponds. Four generations of my family have spent time there together in the beauty of the natural environment and enjoyed life among the wind and trees on our lakefront property. We are bonded by shared and unique experiences there. All of Otto and Ida's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren experienced the ritual of learning to swim in Seven Ponds; at the age of two, we were tied at the waist by a rope and guided by a parent. We are still completely at home among the fish, birds, insects, and reptiles that live there. I grew up learning about life while playing in the fields and swimming in the lakes of Seven Ponds. It is also a place where I learned to accept death; the cremation ashes of Otto and Ida are scattered there.

The inspiration for creating SevenPonds.com comes directly from my grandparents' sense of life and how they lived in harmony with the natural world. Through them, I came to understand how everything in our world is connected—both tangible and intangible. For this reason, I hope to create a meaningful place to learn, heal, grow, and share information and resources about one of the most profound moments in every life: death.

In 1967, the Michigan Audubon Society, a private non-profit organization, secured land on Seven Ponds and set up a nature sanctuary and environmental education center: www.sevenponds.org. Today, we are lucky the Seven Ponds Nature Center owns a majority of the lake frontage. We thank Seven Ponds Nature Center for preserving what we also treasure.

Welcome to SevenPonds.com. We hope it will become as endearing to you as it is to us.

Suzette Sherman, Founder