How an uncconnected telephone in a B.C. park helps people mourn lost loved ones
CBC
When Brooke Robichaud's little brother Henry Wiens died from an overdose last year at the age of 23, she says she didn't have a place to channel her grief.
"He didn't have a burial. He doesn't have a plaque. He was cremated. I didn't really have anywhere to go to talk to him," said the 34-year-old, who lives in Port Moody, B.C.
Without a memorial to commemorate Wiens, Robichaud says she would go to the Burrard Inlet along Rocky Point Park in Port Moody to reflect and grieve. Robichaud, who is part-Indigenous, says she felt connected to the totem pole there.
"It kind of looks like a grave. The totem pole is laying down and people bring flowers there a lot. It felt like a special place," she said.
But after a year of coming to terms with his death, she says found a way to talk to him directly: through a telephone without a line.
Robichaud found Phone of the Wind, an unconnected telephone set up by the Crossroads Hospice Society in Port Moody's Pioneer Memorial Park, where she was accessing bereavement services.
The telephone acts as an intermediary, offering people a place to channel their grief by letting them speak to loved ones who have died.
"The first time I picked up the phone to talk to my brother ... was very uncomfortable and awkward," said Robichaud.
"But handing the phone to my daughter, and just seeing her smile and saying, 'Hi, Uncle Henry,' and, you know, connecting with him and getting to keep his memory alive … I honestly was in tears."
Installed in August this year, Phone of the Wind stands next to the park's Labyrinth Healing Garden.
According to the hospice society, the telephone was purchased on Facebook Marketplace, while the wooden lattice frame has a more poignant meaning: it was recycled from a memorial bench.
The first phone of the wind, also called a wind phone or phone to nowhere, was set up in Ōtsuchi, Japan in 2010. Following the 2011 tsunami, thousands visited it and used the phone to talk to lost loved ones.
Brittany Borean, youth bereavement coordinator with Crossroads Hospice Society, says they got the idea from a similar phone set up in Washington.
"We put it in our park beside our Labyrinth Healing Garden to bring awareness to both grief and death, to things that are universal, but often hidden," she said.