An expert says that the rising number of “wind phones” shows that the public needs to grieve
On the Van Tassel Lake Trail in Digby, N.S., Jonathan Riley clears the snow off an olive-green rotary phone that is sitting on a wooden shelf, almost hidden in the woods.
He picks up the phone, puts in the number, and starts talking.
Instead of putting in a number, he wrote out the name of a friend who had passed away.
“I just tell her about some of the things she’s missed.” I think it’s been about six months. I’ve called her from here two or three times. “Simply to keep in touch.”
Riley set up the phone after seeing one on Instagram along the Appalachian Trail in New York State. He works for the Municipality of the District of Digby.
“It hit me right away that it might be something that could help people,” he said.
From Japan to the worl
Known as kaze no denwaor “wind phone,” was created in northeastern Japan more than ten years ago as a way to stay in touch with the dead.
Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer, lost his cousin in 2010 and needed a place to let out his sadness. He put up an old-fashioned phone booth in his garden. Inside, he put a rotary phone that wasn’t hooked up to anything.
“Because my thoughts couldn’t be sent over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind,” he said in a documentary by NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster.
When the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami hit the area a year later, destroying whole towns and killing nearly 20,000 people, he opened the phone to the public to help friends and family of those who died deal with their grief.
Heather Smith, who was born in Newfoundland, was interested in that NHK show.
She said, “I was really moved by the kids who went into the phone booth to talk to their dead relatives, and I really wanted to show that in a picture book.”
Mr. Hirota’s Garden Has a Phone Boot
Smith and Rachel Wada, an illustrator from British Columbia, contacted Sasaki to ask for his permission to tell his story.
“He did say, ‘Please do so with a clear understanding of how terrible this disaster really was,'” Smith says. “I believe that children’s picture books can cover almost any subject, as long as it is done in a gentle way.”
Smith and Wada’s book, Mr. Hirota’s Garden Has a Phone Booth, which came out in 2019, Smith says that it has been used in schools, funeral homes, and churches of many different types.
She says, “The wind telephone is a beautiful thing, and it’s a beautiful thing to have hope that your words are riding the wind.”
In the past few years, copies have been made in a number of countries.
A website that keeps track of this growing trend says that they have been put up in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Quebec, Alberta, British Columbia, and Alberta.
We keep our sadness to ourselves
Mary Ellen McDonald is glad that her province now has its own wind phone. She is an expert in grief literacy as a medical anthropologist at Dalhousie University.
She says, “What I love about the wind phone is that it shows how private grief is.” “It’s in a public place, which makes grief seem more normal.” “It is bringing it out and saying that it belongs in our world.”
She says that people in the West tend to avoid grief because it is messy, painful, and ugly.
“There is a little bit of social pressure on us.” Keep your sadness to yourself and then go out into the world, like to work, a place of worship, or a shopping mall. Don’t bring your sadness out in public. Instead, keep it to yourself.”
Back on the Van Tassel Lake Trail, Riley says that the wind phone has gotten more people talking about death and grief, which he thinks is good.
“How do you handle your sadness?” There are a million different ways to do it. I think there are as many ways as there are people. So this is just an alternative.
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