This ‘wind phone’ helps grievers feel connected to the loved ones they’ve lost

A Connecticut church has found a creative approach to help grieving people talk about their loss. It’s called a “wind phone” and it’s a place to say what you want to say to the people you’ve lost.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

We all experience grief at some point in our lives, but many of us avoid talking about it. From Connecticut, Meg Dalton reports on a church trying to change that with a creative approach, a telephone.

MEG DALTON, BYLINE: An old, cream-colored rotary phone sits in a grove of trees just outside a historic church. A crowd surrounds the phone and Kate Bagnati steps toward it, picks up the receiver and dials a number.

(SOUNDBITE OF ROTARY PHONE DIAL CLICKING)

KATE BAGNATI: Hey, mama. (Crying) I miss you. I know you’re around, but this is a pretty cool way to talk.

DALTON: Bagnati’s mom, Grace, died about a year ago. The phone she’s using isn’t connected to a telephone line. Reverend Deborah Rundlett says it’s a wind phone.

DEBORAH RUNDLETT: It is a means by which to have the conversations you didn’t get to have – the good, the bad, the ugly – and know that the wind will carry them to the source that needs to receive them.

DALTON: Reverend Rundlett is the pastor of Ridgebury Congregational Church in Ridgefield. Her church’s wind phone is 1 of 4 in Connecticut. The wind phone is attached to a wooden post at the end of a gravel path. There’s a bench next to it, and the plaque above it reads…

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: This phone will never ring. It is connected by love to nowhere and everywhere. It’s for those who have an empty place in their heart left by a loved one. Say hello. Say goodbye. Talk of the past, the present, the future. The wind phone will carry your message.

DALTON: Lynda Shannon Bluestein and her son approach Reverend Rundlett about bringing the phone to her church. Bluestein has terminal cancer and is in hospice care. She wants the wind phone to be a space for normalizing grief.

LYNDA SHANNON BLUESTEIN:…