'Wind phones' give those in grief a connection to lost loved ones in Michigan

• ‘Wind phones' are disconnected phones that give grieving people a symbolic way to 'call' dead loved ones
• A Japanese man established the first wind phone as he grieved for a cousin, sharing it with others after the deadly 2011 tsunami
• Michigan’s dozen or so wind phones are located in quiet spaces, offering space and privacy to mourn, but also to share happier memories

Every few months or so, Tracey Mayeda walks into a woody stretch of northern Kent County to call her dead mother.

She picks her way along a dirt path to a towering dead maple tree and, screwed to it in a protective wooden box, a cream-colored rotary phone.

The handset no longer offers a dialtone, but even now — nearly a half-century after growing up with the family’s rotary phone on the kitchen wall — Mayeda finds her fingers twisting the cord. She tucks the receiver under her chin and begins to dial.

7…8…3…

“Hi Momma,” Mayeda says to the woman who died in 2022. “How are you doing?”

The phone at the Howard Christiansen Nature Center near Kent City is one of at least 12 “wind phones” across Michigan, and hundreds across the globe.

Connected to nothing tangible, the phones invite the living to pick up the receiver and continue unfinished conversations, to recall happier times or to offer life’s updates, said Amy Dawson of New Jersey.

Dawson began plotting the wind phones around the world on her website, mywindphone.com after the death of her daughter, Emily, 25. While the phone at the nature center in Michigan north of Grand Rapids is attached to a tree and protected by a shingled cover, others are housed in walk-in garden structures or located inside old phone booths. Some are plain or tucked out of sight; others are festooned with vibrant colors and art.

In Algonac, a wind phone is nested in a miniature boat.

There is no single list of wind phones, and some are on private land, Dawson said. A former teacher, Dawson spends much of her time now tracking coordinates, stories and pictures of the phones so others may visit.

(Another site, www.thetelephoneofthewind.com, also tracks wind phones.)

It can be a bit unsettling at first — talking into a phone with no earthly connection. But for many, the moment shifts into something “powerful and healing,” Dawson said.

“I say ‘Try, just try it for a minute and see,” she said.

‘It’s putting you in another place’

By design, most installations feature obsolete rotary phones. Like Mayeda, some users dial old phone numbers; others dial the numbers representing names of the deceased or words like “love,” Dawson said.

The click-back of the dial rotating back into place, she said, is perhaps a bit of therapy, too — a sort of wind-down from life’s chaos.

“While you’re sitting there waiting for the phone to click back,” she said, “it’s putting you in another place.”

Shirley Franchock remembers that self-consciousness — unsure what to say at first when she sat down at the wind phone in October at the Clinton Township Senior Center. There, her daughter, Debbie Travis, and other staff had teamed with the local Lowe’s home improvement store and several others to erect a pergola just past the center’s bocce courts. 

Franchock, 88, doesn’t remember the words she said to her late husband, Daniel as she held the old red rotary phone that someone had found on eBay.com. But she remembers the sensation.

“Hello Daniel,” she started.

“You feel you’re talking to their souls,” she told Bridge this month. “It’s unbelievable.”

Related:

• MSU shooting, one year later: What science says about trauma and healing
• Stressed about the election? Blame human instincts. Here are tips to cope
• How grieving survivors help shape Michigan drug policy

The comforts of ritual

For all that is deeply personal about grief, it is universal in its inescapability.

Ritual helps, comforting even as it marks life’s most difficult changes — the ceremonial washing of a loved one’s body, sitting shiva, placing flowers at a graveside, the ofrendas, or offerings, of the annual Día de los Muertos.

The wind phones, likewise, offer ritual.

And much like a park bench placed in memory of a loved one, they help to normalize remembrance and grief, said Dr. Mary Morreale, who teaches psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at Wayne State University’s School of Medicine and works with patients at the Karmanos Cancer Center.

“It says, ‘this is what this is for. It’s okay to come here and stay connected to your loved one,’” Morreale said.

Sometimes, too, the phone is an outlet for unanswered anger, noted Travis at the senior center.

I wasn’t expecting you to leave me so soon. How can I do this without you?

Dialing numbers, letting emotions spill into the phone — “it feels likely that these messages will be carried to loved ones on the wind,” Travis said.

COVID and its millions of deaths forced difficult conversations about grief into a global spotlight. That, in turn, built a better understanding of how to help each other ride out most turbulent times, Dawson said.

“We're doing a better job of having more empathy for people in grief,” she said.

Shocking loss, then peace.

At her Sparta home near the nature center, Tracey Mayeda was still reeling from her mother’s death in 2022. Just hours after Mayeda had wrapped up a visit to her mother’s house, the stay-at-home mother of seven and “the strongest woman I ever met,” died in her sleep, Mayeda said. The guilt of not being there in the final moments deepened her grief.

A TV news story one winter evening about wind phones sent Mayeda, a retired dental technician, to her computer. She and husband, Bruce, who is Japanese, were moved to learn it was a Japanese man who erected the first wind phone as he mourned the loss of a cousin to cancer.

Itaru Sasaki moved the wind phone from his garden to a windy hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean following the deadly 2011 tsunami — a shrine to thousands who died, including many whose bodies were swept out to sea.

In Michigan, Mayeda knew the perfect spot for a phone to talk with her mother and father — the nature center where she had spent so much time growing up and, as an adult, working and volunteering. It was ready to open on Mother’s Day 2022.

The timing, the place, Bruce’s cultural link to the wind phone’s beginnings — “it seemed serendipitous,” Mayeda said.

It was serendipitous for Kim Gillow, too, a long time volunteer at the nature center.

Gillow and her partner had spent five years caring for Gillow’s parents and two aunts. That first Christmas after her mother’s death was among Gillow’s darkest days.

Her parents had embodied the season. There was cherry pie and home-made fudge, a packed farmhouse, the same Christmas tree ornaments year after year, and open arms to others who had no families — “the lost souls,” Gillow said recently.

Gillow had seen plenty of that numbing kind of grief as a psych nurse who worked with hospice patients, with the severely mentally ill, and — as a US Navy nurse — with survivors of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. Still, it made her own pain no easier.

She had heard it before: You don’t get over grief, you have to go through it. 

She couldn’t seem to do it: “I just wanted to take to my bed.”

It was May 27, 2023 at the nature center, and Gillow went looking for the new phone erected in honor of Tracey Mayeda’s parents.

Gillow wasn’t planning a conversation. She was just going to check it out.

But she found herself picking up the phone. It was, after all, her grandmother’s birthday. And Grandma never forgot a birthday.

“Hi Gram,” Gillow began. “If you were alive you’d be…” — Gillow did the math. “... 121.”

“I remember I was just cracking up. That was something my grandma would have said,” Gillow said.

It’s as if these wind phone conversations, one-sided as they may be, began to lay down new mental tracks.

Sometimes, a raw winter wind cuts through the pines and poplar — deep, brooding greens and browns as it did recently when Gillow visited. Other times, violets and trillium have carpeted the woods with the startling colors of spring and promise.

Ten years after they died, those last, awful moments of her parents’ and aunts’ lives — when their breath became ragged and thick and then was no more — receded.

“It helps me erase that moment — that pain, the suffering, the struggle to leave,” said Gillow, now 69. “I replace it with better memories.”

Mayeda says she, too, feels her mother especially so out here. 

“The nature center is a place of serenity and a place of peace,” she said. “You walk the trails and the hustle and bustle of life just melts away.”

In the quiet that lingers, Mayeda said, she finds her mother: “I know she’s with me. She hears me, and when I need her, I feel her strength and her presence.”