New Maryland 'wind phone' helps people grieve lost loved ones

Along the New Maryland nature trails near Fredericton, tucked among the shady evergreens, an old push-button telephone beckons from a towering cedar.

The phone is unconnected, but it reaches through space and time to help the grieving connect with lost loved ones.

It's a "wind phone," spearheaded by the village's Deputy Mayor Tim Scammell after he read a CBC article about a similar project in Deer Lake, N.L.

Having just lost his father, Doug Scammell, 84, unexpectedly in November, he thought, "'Wow, that's a very good idea.'"

"Even if you were there at the end and you said what you wanted to say … there will always be more that you might want to say to them, or things that you missed," said Scammell, who lost his mother Zoe Porter, 71, and younger sister Hayley Peterson, 42, just months apart in 2008.

"Maybe you didn't say, 'I love you,' and you wish you did. So maybe this will help, because sometimes people have regrets, things 'I wish I did or I wish I said' and, you know, maybe this will help ease their mind."

The concept originated in northeastern Japan in 2010. Itaru Sasaki, who was mourning the loss of his cousin to cancer, set up an old-fashioned phone booth in his garden with an unconnected rotary-dial phone inside, and named it kaze no denwa, the Telephone of the Wind.

"Because my thoughts could not be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind," he said in a documentary by Japan's public broadcaster, NHK.

A year later, when a 9.1-magnitude earthquake and tsunami with 30-foot waves hit the area, killing some 20,000 people, Sasaki relocated his phone booth to a windy hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean and opened it up to the public.

Since then, more than 30,000 people have reportedly used the phone, and it has inspired numerous others popping up around the world. More than 100 are currently registered on mywindphone.com, including seven in Canada — in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Alberta, two in B.C., and now, in New Brunswick.

Scammell said he took the idea to New Maryland council and said, "'I think we should do this,' and they said, 'Yeah, absolutely.'"

He was teamed up with Rockland Miller, the village's public works supervisor, whose mother Shirley Miller, 74, had died suddenly during surgery in December.

"Between us it was definitely a labour of love," said Scammell.

Miller says he was "inspired by the project and the whole premise behind it.