The first time Dina Stander picked up the receiver to the so-called “wind phone,” she expected to imagine speaking with her father. Instead, after pressing the disconnected phone to her ear, she heard the voice of her late friend.
“It felt like she had just been waiting for me to pick up the phone,” Stander said. “And it was so beautiful, and I was so astounded that something I thought was an exercise of imagination had so much substance and could be so surprising to me.”
Stander, a Shutesbury resident who has served as an end-of-life navigator, a hospice volunteer and a hospital chaplain, had already been bringing disconnected phones to different events to create pop-up wind phones for some time, with the idea to allow people a space to communicate with deceased loved ones and process their grief.
The practice of the wind phone began in 2010 when Japanese garden designer Itaru Sasaki installed a disconnected phone booth outside his home to have a space to speak to his late cousin. In Japanese, “phone of the wind” translates to “kaze no denwa.”
“Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind,” Sasaki told the Japanese TV channel NHK Sendai. “So I named it the wind telephone.”
The following year, after a devastating earthquake and tsunami killed more than 19,000 people, Sasaki decided to open the phone booth to the public, to give others a space to mourn as well. The wind phone quickly attracted many guests, as well as national and international attention.
Stander first heard about the phone booth in 2016 on the public radio show This American Life and was so captivated by the idea that she reached out to the journalist who reported the segment. She wanted to know if she could create another version, to which she says the journalist replied, “I don’t see why not.”
In fact, around the world, others had begun creating similar spaces, inspired by Sasaki. A map at MyWindPhone.com indicates there are 363 recorded wind phones across the U.S., with the closest one to Franklin County being in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Stander said she was previously interested in spaces similar to the wind phone. As an artist, she had been particularly interested in photo booths, which she noted are another space where individuals have a solitary experience confined to the space of “interacting with the unknown.”
Stander reached out to her longtime friend Gary Seldon, a Greenfield-based carpenter. Together, the two created a wind phone for Life Forest, a cemetery for cremated remains in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.
Stander described Life Forest as “the friendliest cemetery” she’s ever seen. She immediately felt it would be a good place for a wind phone.
She and the founder of Life Forest, Mel Bennett, decided to first install a temporary wind phone, and later to add the permanent booth, designed to last for a century.
The booth, which is wide enough to be wheelchair accessible, is made of cedar and has a metal roof and lattice on three sides to provide privacy. Seldon said he approached the design process with the intention of creating a space that felt almost sacred.
“I kept on thinking of it as building an alter,” he said. “It meant, for me, that I was going to make all the wood look as beautiful as I could.”
