Downtown wind phone helps grieving Atlantans connect with lost loved ones
Attached to a tree in Downtown Atlanta's Woodruff Park is a placard with a rotary phone fashioned on it. The phone isn't plugged into anything, but it serves as a powerful tool for locals who are experiencing loss or grief.
It's called a wind phone. First started in Japan in 2010, there are now wind phones across Georgia and around the world.
On a recent day, Pamela Elder-Mobley stopped by the phone and picked up the receiver.
"I don't know what I was expecting. It's a wind phone, so I think I was expecting some wind," Elder-Mobley said. "But it was just silent."
The silence from the Atlanta wind phone is sometimes just as noisy as its downtown surroundings.
For a moment, the line was quiet until Elder-Mobley said she felt her daughter's presence.
"Raven was killed in a hit-and-run head-on collision in March of 2023," she said. "Raven was amazing, OK? That young woman, that lady — she was amazing. This happened when she was only 22 years old. It was just weeks before she was scheduled to graduate Georgia State."
The profound change left her family with no time to prepare for grief.
"We literally went from planning her graduation to planning her funeral in a split second," she said.
The wind phone Elder-Mobley is using is part of an art installation called "The Space Within." The phone was installed by Grief House, a nonprofit that helps the community deal with difficult emotions.
"It's a way to be intentional with your grief and a way to create some sort of outlet so that it's not internal all the time, and a way to externalize and process," Grief House co-founder Sascha Demerjian said.
"When you think about missing someone during the holidays, we are missing our children during the holidays, and that's a type of pain that's not able to be described," Elder-Mobley said.
It's a pain that is often difficult to navigate.
"Grief rarely gets invited to things. A lot of times, if you bring grief out or if it slips out, it kind of shuts down the party, the conversation, the vibe, the mood. But at the Grief House, we start there—knowing that that's welcome and invited and going to be held compassionately," Demerjian said. "It allows for a lot of other feelings to emerge too, like joy and laughter."
Here, it simply requires picking up the telephone.
"Pick it up. Pick it up scared. Pick it up happy. I think that when you're navigating grief, there's no one way to navigate this process. There's no one way to heal, and so try new things," Elder-Mobley said. "Me coming to pick up a wind phone was a new thing, OK? And I'm glad I tried."
You can find the closest wind phone to you on the My Wind Phone website.