My mother died in my hospice home in 2020, the day my state of Washington went into lockdown for COVID-19. Her body was removed, but none of the usual grief stones were available to our family. There was no funeral or support gathering, no food delivery and no hugs. For months afterward, as the nationwide lockdown continued, thousands of other families like mine saw these death rituals—society’s social anchors for grieving—stripped away.
As a clinical social worker and health fellow with 40 years of experience in end-of-life care and bereavement, I knew I needed some way to care for my mother’s grief. While on lockdown, I started looking for resources to help me. Then I heard about the wind phone.
What is a wind phone?
In its simplest form, a wind phone is a rotary phone or push-button phone that sits in an isolated spot in nature, usually inside a booth-type structure and often next to a chair or bench. The phone line has been disconnected.
People use the wind phone to “call” and have a one-way conversation with loved ones who have died. Here they can say the things that remain unsaid. Wind phones provide a setting for the person to tell their story of grief, reminisce and continue to connect with the departed person. For many it is a profoundly moving and life-affirming experience.
For 200 wind telephones are scattered throughout the United States. Wind phones are open to the public, free, and usually found in parks, hiking trails, and churches. Usually, they are made by those who want to honor a lost loved one.
The wind phone launched in Japan in 2010when Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer, built a phone booth in his backyard so he could “talk” to a deceased relative. Months later, the Earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima; within minutes, more than 20,000 people died.
Sasaki opened the phone booth to his neighbors, who urgently needed a place to express their grief. Word spread and soon people came on pilgrimage from all over Japan Talk through the “wind phone” to loved ones.
Since then, wind phones have spread around the world.
Do wind phones work?
Grief is a universal human experience; it affects us psychologically, socially, spiritually and even biologically. Some of our earliest rituals as humans are those surrounding death, with some practices over 10,000 years old, such as using flowers in burial ceremonies and placing the dead man as if asleep, with a pillow under their head.
However, there is still no clear guidance on how people should deal with grief. But the power of talking with the deceased rather than about the deceased has long been at the root of many grief interventions worldwide, including Gestalt therapywhich encourages patients to role-play or re-enact life experiences. A common approach taken by a Gestalt therapist is to have the client speak directly to an empty chair while imagining the bereaved person sitting there. A similar approach is to write a letter to the deceased and then read it aloud.
What these techniques and the wind phone have in common is the use of a conversational approach that allows for connection, reflection and the safe release of strong emotions. By their very nature, both speech and writing encourage direct emotional expression. This helps release physical and psychological tension in the body.
Plus, the spontaneity of saying it out loud can reveal subconscious ideas. This is because talking can overcome the internal censorship of painful thoughts.
Using a wind phone can evoke strong emotionsand not all are positive. They can cause tears, anger, guilt and shame. Some conversations become confessional. The wind phone setting provides a way to contain the feelings that the bereaved’s anxiety can overwhelm them.
Research is needed
In American culture, it’s common to talk about closure over the loss of a loved one – getting over it and moving on. It is true that the initial period of deep grief and trauma usually fades over time, but some grief can persist throughout life. In the weeks, months, and years after the death, emotions may erupt unexpectedly in “grief attacks” or sudden waves of emotion, triggered by a memory, a smell, an event or a thought.
To my knowledge, no research has been conducted on wind phones, so it is not yet possible to scientifically say whether they definitively help a person deal with their grief. This is not surprising. studies of bereavement have not received as much research attention as mental health disorders such as depression or anxiety, although grief may lead to any of these disorders.
However, the rapid spread of wind phones over the past decade suggests, if nothing else, that there is an almost universal need for the bereaved to deal with grief. And for the thousands who have tried it, there is convenience through a one-way call.
