A Line to Somewhere: Staying Connected to the Ones We’ve Lost

A few years into this work, a client told me something that has stuck with me. She said she still talked to her mother every morning while she made coffee. Not out loud, but in her head, telling her what the day held. She looked almost embarrassed admitting it, like she expected me to tell her it was time to stop.

I didn’t. I told her to keep talking.

For a long time, our culture had a narrow idea of healthy grieving. You cried, processed, let go, and moved on. If someone was still setting a place at the table for a father gone five years, we worried they were stuck.

But grief researchers moved away from that idea decades ago. The goal of grieving was never to sever the bond with the person who died, but to carry it forward in a new way. Psychologists call this “continuing bonds,” meaning the relationship doesn’t end when the person dies. It changes shape, becoming internal rather than physical. For most people, that ongoing connection is a sign of healthy integration, not of being stuck.

This shows up in ordinary moments. A woman keeps her grandmother’s sauce-splattered recipe card taped inside a cabinet. A father talks to his son’s photo before work. None of this means these people haven’t grieved well. It usually means the opposite.

What continuing bonds give grievers is permission to still love someone out loud, without a deadline on it. Treated as a normal part of loss instead of pathology, people stop apologizing for their grief and start living alongside it.

This is part of why I’ve been so moved by a project coming to our own backyard this fall. In October, a Wind Phone will be installed in Gunnar Anderson Forest Preserve, along the Fox River in Geneva. The project was started by Elaine Haughan, a Geneva resident, in honor of her son James, who died in 2021 at the age of 18. With her enthusiastic permission and support, the Forest Preserve District of Kane County will bring her vision to life.

If you haven’t heard of a Wind Phone, the idea is simple and beautiful. It’s an old-fashioned rotary phone, unconnected to any wires or network, set somewhere quiet in nature. You pick up the receiver and talk to whoever you’ve lost. There’s no dial tone or operator to interfere with your conversation. You have a direct, symbolic line to your person. The Wind Phone is a place to reach out to them.

The first Wind Phone was installed in a garden in Japan by a man who wanted to stay connected to a cousin who’d died. After a tsunami devastated the region soon after, thousands of grieving families made pilgrimages to that booth. Word spread, and now Wind Phones sit in forests and gardens worldwide, each a quiet monument to the idea that love doesn’t need a working line to travel.

What I love about this location is that it places continuing bonds inside a forest preserve, somewhere many of us already go to breathe easier. Being outside, surrounded by trees older than our grief and a river that keeps moving, makes big feelings more bearable.

So when you picture that Wind Phone being installed this October, consider this as a place in the woods where a mother can update her son on his niece’s first steps, or someone can finally say out loud something they haven’t been able to say since the funeral.

We’re proud to support Elaine’s vision, and we hope this Wind Phone becomes a place our whole community turns to, but as one more way to practice what continuing bonds is really about. What started as one mother’s way of staying connected to her son is becoming something the rest of us get to benefit from too.

If you find yourself standing at that phone this fall, holding the receiver, unsure what to say, I’d offer you the same thing I offered my client. Just start talking. They’re listening in the only way that matters now, which is inside you.