SEATTLE — We were in the ferry line on Whidbey Island when I felt the familiar urge to call my mom.
That wasn’t possible. I knew that.
I looked around, at the passenger waiting room and myriad Subarus and camper vans, hoping to find something to focus on rather than my grief, lingering like an ugly dormant volcano.
A light caught my eye, shining on a relic of a bygone analog era: a pay phone, housed under a Whidbey Telecom cover. I walked over and held the heavy receiver in my hands. The phone works, though that didn’t matter to me. I dialed a number, the one I memorized when I was 5.
My mom died two months ago. I wanted to call her one more time.
I wrote about the concept of wind phones in a Seattle Times story focused on one such phone in an Olympia park. There, and at wind phones around the world, users talk to their dead loved ones through an unconnected telephone, often in decorated phone booths or isolated swaths of lush greenery.
This Whidbey Island pay phone, I thought, would be my own makeshift wind phone.
I approached the story with the healthy dose of skepticism required of journalists committed to objectivity. I wondered how a nonworking phone, often in forms rendered obsolete by smartphones, could really serve as a tool for grieving. I spoke with wind phone creators, grief experts and a woman who had traveled thousands of miles solely to use the Olympia wind phone.
After it was published in August, I immediately heard from readers in various stages of their grief journeys. One wrote that he was going to create a wind phone in his backyard, for his own use. Another inquired about the location of area wind phones, as she had just heard that a friend had died suddenly. A Seattle folk singer even wrote a song about wind phones after reading my story.
The best response was from my mom, who lived in Kansas City. She was a proud member of the dedicated and dwindling group of print readers of The Kansas City Star, and my story had run in the newspaper. “You are famous!” she exclaimed; the novelty of seeing her daughter’s byline had never worn off. She loved the concept of wind phones and wanted to see whether any were around her. If not, she said, she would make her own.
On Oct. 19 — exactly two months after my story was published — my mom wasn’t answering my calls. Later, I listened to the voicemails I had left, the tone changing each time: jokingly asking where she is, annoyed she’s not answering, scared something is wrong. I kept calling, praying she would answer.
Something was very, very wrong. My brother found our mom conscious but extremely sick with an infection that had come on suddenly.
My mom died the next day. She passed away while my plane was over Wyoming. I never got to say goodbye.
Our relationship over the past decade I’ve lived in Seattle had been defined by phone calls. My mom had many health challenges over the years that started with a stroke when I was a teenager, and I was a long-distance caregiver, one of the 5.8 million people who provide care to someone who lives an hour or more away, according to the National Alliance for Caregiving. My brother in Kansas City and I shared responsibilities; I coordinated her medical appointments, ordered food, ensured her house was in order and whatever else she needed, especially during the pandemic.
Most crucially, we were always just a phone call away.
Every day, soon after she woke up, she called me to … let me know she had woken up. (I did appreciate the confirmation.) She updated me on the weather with a Midwestern tinge of suspense, then would often ask me to confirm her doctors’ appointment or whether a prescription was ready. She would call in the evening, and again right before she went to bed, so I was always the last person she spoke to before she fell asleep. In between were emergency calls, like when a ceiling was leaking. Or “emergency” — did you see that a Real Housewife of the “Real Housewives of Insert City Here” was arrested? While listening to the more than 100 voicemails I have saved, I had to laugh over how she never differentiated the two types in her breathless voicemails to call her back.
While reporting my story on wind phones, a grief counselor told me that clients often say death feels like someone is out of town, but they don’t have their phone. We want to continue a relationship, even if someone isn’t here. Talking directly to someone is a different process.
Soon after she died, I called my mom’s number, though I knew it would go straight to voicemail. I just wanted to hear her voice.
My mom’s phone has been disconnected, but muscle memory tried to dial the number anyway. I thought of Merlinda Sain, who created a wind phone in Battle Ground, after her son died unexpectedly. She goes to her phone when her heart hurts or there’s something new in her life.
“Grief is probably the most powerful emotion on the planet,” she told me. “When we lose someone who has been significant to us, there is a desperation to reconnect with them in any way you possibly can.”
It took a few breaths to speak into the phone, the weight hitting as I cradled the receiver. I didn’t say a lot — just that I missed her, I got through Christmas OK, I wish she was here. And I loved her so very much. The ferry was approaching, and I didn’t want to upset the unsuspecting walk-on passenger standing nearby. I told my mom I would call her again soon. I hung up and returned to the car. I felt lighter. I called my mom, knowing she wouldn’t answer. I know she heard me.
