OLYMPIA — Brittany Bacinski prepared to connect with her first love, putting into words what she should have told him years ago. She had traveled more than 2,000 miles from her home in Michigan to speak with him in an Olympia park.
The one-sided conversation would be through a vintage rotary phone. She picked up the receiver, the dense weight matching the heaviness she felt. She stuck her finger into the clear holes, dialed a number and began talking.
The phone wasn’t connected to anything, her words didn’t go anywhere. And that was the point. The man she called in 2022 — whom she didn’t want to break up with all those years ago, whose missed call before her wedding day stayed in her mind during and after her ill-fated marriage — died in 2019.
But with the 10-minute call in the forest, she finally said all she needed to say.
Hello. You were right all along. I should have chosen you.
Bacinski used the Telephone of the Wind in Olympia’s Squaxin Park, where users speak to the dead through an unconnected telephone. Known as “wind phones,” they are meant to carry the griever’s words to the wind in phone booths or isolated swaths of forests.
The phones provide dedicated spaces to address grief in a tangible way in a culture that’s increasingly focused on “moving on” from loss. The phones, coordinators and users say, are especially important now as society grapples with lingering trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The concept is modeled after a wind phone in Japan that, in the years after the deadly 2011 earthquake and tsunami, has had thousands of visitors. Dozens of wind phones have popped up throughout the U.S. over the past few years, including in Olympia, Tacoma and Battle Ground.
A phone for memories and saying goodbyes
The day in 2020 that Corey Dembeck found out his family friends’ 4-year-old daughter, Joelle, had died, Dembeck ran to a thrift store to find a rotary phone. He took some plywood, attached the phone and sneaked it into Squaxin Park, then known as Priest Point Park.
“I was in shock,” he recalled. “How many families are ready to bury their 4-year-old daughter?”
He wrote a blog post about the phone to point readers to the family’s GoFundMe. A few weeks later, he received a call asking for the phone’s exact location. Then another, and another. More people began showing up, to the point where parkgoers formed lines to use the phone connected to nowhere.
The city of Olympia asked if he would be willing to replace what he admits was a rush job when he screwed the phone to a tree. The original Japanese wind phone has an English-style phone booth, but that was too large, so Dembeck decided to pay homage instead by using Japanese construction techniques. He watched countless hours of YouTube videos, mostly in Japanese, to teach himself how to carve by hand and copy the marks for the joints from a big tree stump.
“I felt like if I carved them, it should be done with thought and intent and care, and maybe more sweat than just screwing something together,” he said.
“Telephone of the Wind” is carved into the display that holds the phone, as is a dedication:
“This phone is for everyone who has lost a loved one. The phone is an outlet for those who have messages they wish to share with their friends and family. It is a phone for memories and saying the goodbyes you never got to say.”
The phone is in an isolated area of the park, where visitors tend to take a few wrong turns along the trails before finding the spot. Even on hot days, temperatures seem to fall a few degrees in the lush forest. Only birdsong or nearby hikers break the silence.
You might feel stupid at first, Dembeck says, but just start talking, about your life now or what you miss about them or what you wish you had said.
“You feel mentally better,” he said. “You feel a weight lifted off your shoulder.”
A phone for release
Over decades as a grief counselor, Taryn Lindhorst has often heard from clients that death feels like someone is out of town, but they don’t have their phone. Talking directly to someone, rather than talking about them, is a different process for brains and hearts.
“We are in this constant state of trying to continue the relationship, whether the person is here or not,” said Lindhorst, University of Washington’s Behar professor of oncology and palliative social work. “The wind phones are a very interesting artistic expression for that longing to be in a relationship.”
Death practices and grief rituals have shifted over the decades — more people opt for cremation and might not have a gravestone for someone to visit. Or a loved one might be buried in another part of the country. The pandemic stole countless last visits.
“There are these ways we have shifted our death practices that leave people feeling a little bit lost about ‘Where do I go? When do I do something?’ ” said Lindhorst, who is also director of the Center for Integrative Oncology and Palliative Care Social Work. “We don’t have great grieving rituals in this country.”
