Wind phones help us connect with lost loved ones

On hole 11 of Canal Shores Golf Course in Evanston, Illinois, nestled in a grove of old-growth trees, sits a bright red telephone booth — fashioned after Britain’s red phone boxes, complete with glass doors and intricate gold royal crowns.

It’s a wind phone, meant to connect visitors with the people they love and have lost.

Wind phones originated in Japan — the brainchild of architect Itaru Sasaki, who purchased an old phone booth and set it up in his garden to carry on conversations with his late cousin who died of cancer. They typically contain an old rotary phone, not wired to anything, and sit in some sort of natural area.

Sasaki first placed his in 2010. Now they dot the world, from New Zealand to Poland to Marshall, North Carolina. (You can find a map of them at mywindphone.com.)

The Canal Shores edition is new to Evanston. It was placed there in late June in honor of Oliver Leopold, an Evanston native who died unexpectedly in 2021 at age 19.

“I love the image of picking up this phone and your words are just carried off into the wind,” Mary Leopold, Oliver’s mom, told me.

She read about wind phones shortly after losing Oliver and was immediately transfixed.

“Not only for my loss,” Leopold said, “but I know so many people who’ve lost children, tragically. The more I dive deep into grief, the more I read about grief and process my own grief, the more I realize we have very little in our society where grief is kind of embraced and encouraged.”

The Leopolds’ neighbor, Patrick Hughes, worked with the golf course to secure a spot for the wind phone. Hughes’ friends Dawn Okamoto and Henry James launched a GoFundMe to raise the $4,000 necessary to manufacture, transport and install the booth. They reached their fundraising goal in two days.

Oliver was well-known and beloved in Evanston.

He graduated from Evanston Township High School a semester early to get a jump-start on his dream of working full-time as an emergency medical technician and completing paramedics training.

He was a regular fixture at the Evanston Fire Department, first as part of the youth Fire Explorer Program and later as an employee. At his high school graduation party — outdoors, masked, in the middle of winter, thanks to COVID-19 — a group of Evanston firefighters swung by in their truck and posed for photos with Oliver in his cap and gown.

Oliver even purchased a decommissioned Evanston Fire Department truck at an auction once, much to his parents’ surprise. (Chagrin?)

“I said, ‘Where are you going to park this thing?’” his mom recalls. “He said, ‘Oh! I don’t know!’ All his friends thought it was so cool.”

They eventually found a spot for it in Wilmette, at a lot where people store boats, landscaping equipment and other non-driveway-appropriate machines. His firefighter friends taught him how to wash it and fill it with gas. The Leopolds donated the truck to the Illinois Fire Service Institute in Champaign after Oliver died.

“Oliver marched on his own path,” Leopold said. “My husband and I are social workers and he asked us for a briefcase when he was little.”

By age 8, Oliver had a YouTube channel, which he filled with instructional videos for kids. How to apply for a debit card. How to operate a cash register. His mom can’t bring herself to watch them now.

His family’s grief is layered with unanswered questions. His official cause of death is inconclusive. His parents found him unresponsive in his bedroom and, at first, thought he died by suicide. But a medical examiner found no lethal substances in his body. An autopsy revealed undetected heart anomalies, but they don’t know, conclusively, if those caused or contributed to his death.

“What happens when you don’t know the narrative of the death of your child?” Leopold said.

That’s not a question with one answer. Or any answers. It’s a question that defies just about everything we hold sacred. It’s unbearable.

The wind phone, Leopold said, is one way through.

“These kinds of projects have kept me going,” she said. “Connecting to other people. Connecting to other moms. Connecting, ideally, to the community. It all makes me feel more connected to Oliver and what I know he would love to see. It feels right.”

When she was visiting the wind phone the other day, a couple stopped by who lost their son two decades ago. They told her it took their breath away to stumble upon it.

“It’s not just for Oliver,” she said. “It’s for everybody. I want it to be an offering to the community.”

A bright, beating heart, firetruck red offering. Beautiful.

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