Telephone of the Wind
In 2010, Japanese garden designer Itaru Sasaki placed an old phone booth in his garden and installed an unconnected rotary phone. He’d go out to talk to his cousin who had died of cancer the year before. He called it The Telephone of the Wind. The next year, he made it available to the thousands of people who never had a chance to say goodbye to loved ones they’d lost in the huge earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Over 1200 people were killed in his village alone, about 20,000 in total. His project struck a chord; since then, over 30,000 people have used his phone. Hundreds of wind phones, of every imaginable design, have been installed around the world. They are a way to say goodbye, to say you’re sorry, to offer forgiveness, to give good news, to share your grief.
qathet’s Telephone of the Wind was welcomed into the Cranberry Cemetery on Sunday, November 3, 2024. Tla’amin elder Les.Pet Doreen Point said a prayer to bless its installation on Tla’amin territory where it gives people another way of communicating with loved ones they have lost.
Ours is an old rotary phone (donated kindly by the PR Health-Care Auxiliary Economy Shop) sitting on a shelf built into a beautiful slab of local maple (donated by hospice volunteer Roger Langmaid). It stands on a stone donated by T & R Contracting. But most importantly it was Harvey Chometsky who designed and built the phone with Roger’s support. I got to help inset the spiral of beach pebbles above the phone, a spiral that changes from grey to white to signal the lightening of your spirit as your words are carried on the wind to the one you miss. Or that Harvey says draws a link between the earth and the spirit.
To give you a sense of how an unconnected phone might be a way to channel grief or honour the memory of someone you’ve lost, let me tell you a story.
In 1956, when I was three, my dad was able to come home from a Vancouver hospital where he’d been in rehabilitation after contracting polio just before I was born. We moved into the new house he’d begun building before he got sick and that others had helped finish. We also got a new phone number, one we children had to memorize in case we needed to call home. It followed us when we moved down to Grief Point a dozen years later. It was the number I always called to talk to my mother, and it stayed hers until she died last year. We still have that number on our landline. My cell phone lists it as Mom. When I think of all the times I dialed it over the years and all the stories we shared, it’s easy to feel the connection is still, in some way, there.
A couple of months ago, on our way to catch the ferry home, we received a phone message from Mom. My sister was staying at our house, so I assumed it was her. But when we played the message through the Bluetooth, my mom’s voice filled the car. “I don’t know why you would be calling me,” she began. We were stunned because Mom had been gone for almost a year. I remember hearing and deleting that message when we first received it. But there it was, a year later. We were more than a little shaken. It seemed especially poignant because we were in the midst of this wind phone project.
While it seems the first person I’d call would be my mom, I think it will be my dad, who died almost 55 years ago. If I could, I’d put the phone on speaker and introduce him to my husband, sons and grandson and tell him about all the things we’ve done over the years, not to mention the surprise of finding myself back here in the house he had built for my mom just a couple of years before he died. Standing in the cemetery where her ashes are buried, his name on her gravestone too.
Who would you call?
Harvey Chometsky building the telephone of the wind in his outdoor studio
Sheila, right, tells the story of this telephone of the wind.
Roger lowers the stone from his van
Thanks to the qathet Regional District Board of Directors and staff who gave us permission to install the phone and to Four Tides Hospice for their support.
