A disconnected phone is giving people a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones

Of all the words Merle Taylor might have shared with her son Chris but for his sudden death in 2018, there’s one that stands out. “We didn’t know he was going to die,” says Taylor of the 34-year-old, who suffered a brain aneurysm while on holiday in Bali with his wife and two young sons. “We were left with all these things we wanted to say to him but couldn’t – including ‘goodbye’.”

Such regret was exacerbating Taylor’s grief when, years later, she came across an article about Itaru Sasaki, a Japanese man who had installed a glass-paned phone booth, housing an unconnected, rotary-dial phone, in the hills above Otsuchi on Japan’s Pacific coast. The disconnected phone had previously stood in Sasaki’s garden, where he’d placed it to facilitate his grieving after the death of his cousin from cancer.

Sasaki relocated the “wind phone”, as he called it, following the devastating tsunami of 2011, which killed 1284 people in Otsuchi, some 10 per cent of its population. The phone was, in part, a shrine, but also an invitation, extended by Sasaki to mourners, to pick up the receiver and tell their loved ones – and the ocean wind that blows up the mountainside – all the things they never got a chance to say.

Taken by the idea, Taylor began lobbying Perth’s Bayswater Council to set up a wind phone in Perth’s Claughton Reserve – a favourite park of Chris and his family. In 2022, an old-school, black rotary phone set inside a white box was installed in the park. There are hundreds of wind phones around the world, but this may be the only one in Australia. “When you’re grieving, you want to help yourself, but you also want to help other people,” says Taylor, a diabetes educator. “I thought, this is a way that people can connect with people they’ve lost. It might help them heal.”

Melbourne grief counsellor Rachel Kleinman says the wind phone concept makes perfect sense, particularly in cultures which have a more repressed response to grief. “Wailing and keening at funerals is normal in some cultures; there’s a lot of actual vocal and verbal expression we don’t really allow [in Australia],” she says. “We’re not particularly grief-literate.

“Some people aren’t comfortable with talking to a loved one. But there’s something powerful and healthy about speaking out loud, which can actually help you connect with, and move through, your emotions. So the idea of a telephone is pretty symbolic, right? It’s literally giving people permission to speak out loud.”

These days, Merle Taylor – who helps run Leafy’s Legacy, a charity raising funds and awareness for brain aneurysms – doesn’t use the wind telephone in Claughton Reserve; it’s for others. Besides, there is an unconnected vintage wooden wall-phone at her home that Chris’ boys – Drift, 7, and Reef, 9 – often use to speak to their father.

“[Drift], in particular, likes using the phone,” Taylor says. “He was only nine months old when Chris died. But I’ll see him sitting on the lounge with the phone receiver in his hand. He’ll say to me, ‘What numbers do I press to call Dad?’ ” She tells him 432836, which spells “heaven” on the phone’s rotary dial. “I’ll then leave him alone and he has this little chat. So even for him, you know, it’s just part of that healing process.”

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