Evanston wind phone at Canal Shores Golf Course helps grieving people connect with lost loved ones
An old, disconnected British-style phone booth at Canal Shores Golf Course in Evanston, Illinois, has become a lifeline for grieving people to connected with loved ones they've lost.
Golfers know the wind can hurt or help, but at the wind phone, it can also connect.
The phone booth is set up off the 11th hole. It doesn't work, at least not in the traditional sense. But while the line is disconnected, it helps those like Mary Leopold find connection.
"There is something about the heft of it," she said. "it's heavy."
Mary uses the wind phone to talk to her son Oliver.
"I miss you so much," she says into the receiver. "I miss your dimples. I miss your mess in the house. I miss kissing your cheeks."
It's as if her words are carried by the wind all the way to him.
By 19, Oliver Leopold was already an EMT, entrepreneur and a YouTuber.
"He was very, could be very stubborn. Intense at times, but had a great sense of humor and was just, you know, very loving and kind," his mother said.
There's not a day that goes by that she doesn't miss everything about him. Oliver Leopold died suddenly at home in December 2021.
"Losing someone the way we lost Oliver, so unexpectedly and so tragically, there's no preparation for that," Mary said.
Mary is a therapist, and is no stranger to grief at her job.
"I feel like my work as a therapist is all around grief all the time," she said. "Even if someone hasn't lost someone to death, that we're all grieving all the time."
Mary channels her grief into creativity, painting memorial rocks for people and arranging them around the phone booth that her family raised money to install at Canal Shores.
The idea for the wind phone came from Japan, where an old rotary phone allowed thousands to grieve after the tsunami and earthquake of 2011.
"I think that the wind phone allows just like a total freedom of speech to talk about your grief, even if it's with your loved one in the phone booth," Mary said.
According to mywindphone.com, which tracks wind phones all over the world, there are more than 400 wind phones in the United States and more than a dozen in Illinois.
"It's a nice place. I've gone a couple times. I've talked to my mom who's passed away," said golfer Matthew Kopp. "Like talking into the receiver, it feels like a different type of connection. A physical connection."
"It moves my grief like literally in a way from inside to outside. From inside my body, where it can get really trapped," Mary said.
A wind phone is a lifeline for anyone who's loved and lost.
Mary Leopold is also the author of a new book that comes out later this year, called "The Landscape of After: A Therapist's Memoir of Moving Through Grief."
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