Conversations in Grief Blog: Conversations

Conversations

by Laura Wessels

When your loved one dies, you don’t lose them just at the moment of death, but every time you want to connect with them, say a word, give them news, or receive their touch. The journey of grief begins with your brain searching for your person. When you begin to understand that they are lost physically to you, it doesn’t keep you from yearning for them. You long to celebrate joys and share worries with them. The absence of your person is deafening. The silence is loud.

Often the bereaved will say, as if they are confessing, “I talk to her every morning,” or “I tell him about my day and then kiss his picture goodnight.”

Itaru Sasaki felt the need to continue his conversation with his cousin who died of cancer. In 2010, he created a space in his garden by purchasing a phone booth and then installing a rotary phone in the booth. The translation of the name he gave his phone booth is The Telephone of the Wind.

The following year, an earthquake resulted in a tsunami with 30-foot waves that hit Japan. Entire towns were destroyed, and thousands of people died. Many bodies were not recovered because they were swept out to sea. Itaru salvaged his phone booth and relocated it to a hill. And then he invited mourners to use his phone booth to make calls to the loved ones they had lost in the tsunami. He hoped that giving them an avenue to connect with the one they had lost would help them in their grief.

From this instance, wind phones have been erected around the world. Go to the website Home | My Wind Phone (https://www.mywindphone.com) for directions to find a wind phone near you. Currently, there are four in Wisconsin: located in Madison, Rhinelander, Sturgeon Bay, and Waunakee.

Wind phones give people a place to connect with a loved one. A place that legitimizes and honors their need to remain in a relationship with their person.

Whether or not a wind phone is near enough for you to visit, you may want to use the idea of a wind phone as inspiration to create a place in your home or your yard to focus on your grief and your memories and to tell your loved one whatever you need to say. I recently met a woman who created a space under a canopy of trees where she arranged a circle of rocks, one large enough for her to rest upon, and others collected from trips that were meaningful to her. Her quiet place. Her healing place.

May the wind phone inspire you to continue the conversation with your loved one. If you have visited a wind phone or if you have a space in your home to attend to your grief, I know I as well as others would love to read about your experience.