My mother died in my home hospice in 2020, the day my state of Washington went into COVID-19 lockdown. Her body was removed, but our family was deprived of the standard rituals of mourning. There was no funeral or consolation gathering, no food deliveries and no hugs. For months afterward, because the national lockdown continued, hundreds of other families like mine saw those death rituals—society's social support for grief—stripped away from them.
As clinical social employee and health scientist With 40 years of experience in end-of-life care and bereavement, I knew I had to search out a technique to cope with my grief over my mother. During lockdown, I searched for resources for help. Then I heard in regards to the Wind Phone.
What is a wind phone?
A wind telephone, in its simplest form, is a rotary dial or push-button telephone arrange in a secluded location in nature, often in a cabin-like structure and infrequently next to a chair or bench. The telephone line is disconnected.
People use the wind phone to “phone” deceased family members and have a one-way conversation. Here they’ll say things which have been left unsaid. Wind phones provide a setting for the person to inform the story of their grief, reminisce and proceed to remain connected with the deceased person. For many, it’s a deeply moving, life-affirming experience.
To 200 wind phones are scattered throughout the United States. Wind phones are free to the general public and are typically present in parks, along climbing trails, and on church grounds. They are often built by individuals who wish to honor a loved one who has passed away.
The wind telephone began in Japan in 2010when Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer, built a telephone booth in his garden so he could “talk” to a deceased relative. Months later Earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima; inside just a few minutes greater than 20,000 people died.
Sasaki opened the phone booth for his neighbors, who desperately needed a spot to specific their grief. The news spread, and shortly people from throughout Japan were making pilgrimages to speak to those they love through the “wind telephone”.
Since then, wind phones have spread throughout the world.
Do wind phones work?
Grief is a universal human experience; it affects us psychologically, socially, spiritually and even biologicalSome of our earliest rituals as humans are those surrounding death, with some practices dating back greater than 10,000 years, similar to Use of flowers in funeral ceremonies and to position the deceased as if he were sleeping, with a pillow under the pinnacle.
Yet there are still no clear guidelines on how people should cope with grief. But the facility of talking with the deceased, moderately than about them, has long been the idea of many grief interventions around the globe. including Gestalt therapythat encourages patients to role play or re-enact life experiences. A standard approach utilized by a Gestalt therapist is to have the client speak on to an empty chair while imagining the person they’ve lost sitting there. The same approach is to jot down a letter to the deceased after which read it aloud.
What these techniques and the Wind Phone have in common is using a conversational approach that enables for connection, reflection, and the secure release of strong emotions. Both speaking and writing inherently encourage direct expression of feelings; this helps to release physical and psychological tension within the body.
In addition, the spontaneity of speaking out loud can reveal subconscious insights. This is because speaking can overcome the inner censorship of painful thoughts.
Using a Wind Phone can evoke strong emotionsand never all of them are positive. They can evoke tears, anger, guilt and shame. Some conversations turn into confessionals. The wind phone setting offers a technique to contain feelings that will overwhelm the concerns of the bereaved.
Research is required
In American culture, it's common to discuss processing the lack of a loved one – getting over it and moving on. It's true that the initial period of deep grief and trauma often fades with time, but some grief can last a lifetime. In the weeks, months, and years after the death, feelings can erupt unexpectedly in the shape of “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 done on wind phones yet, so from a scientific perspective it just isn’t yet possible to say whether or not they definitely help an individual cope with their grief. This just isn’t surprising; studies on grief haven’t received as much research attention as mental disorders similar to depression or anxiety, although grief result in one among these disorders.
But the rapid proliferation of wind phones over the past decade suggests that grieving people almost in every single place have a have to cope with their grief. And hundreds who’ve tried it could find comfort in a phone call.
image credit : theconversation.com