Meant to be? Arizona journey to spread parents’ ashes leads straight to ‘wind phone’
LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — It was a chance encounter … or was it? Looking back on it now, we were drawn into our first experience with a “wind phone” like a magnet more than 200 miles away.
My wife, Gina, wanted to fulfill her mother’s request to return to Arizona upon her death. Her mother, originally from Ohio, fell in love with Arizona’s gorgeous landscape of cactus, rock formations and unending blue sky. Gina felt that scattering both of her parents’ ashes in various locations would accomplish that.
I can be a little impatient when I don’t know the plan, and despite the time she spent researching the rules on scattering ashes, she hadn’t picked a spot. We drove through Wickenburg and we didn’t really see a good spot, so I figured we would continue on to Phoenix and scout out a place in the next day or two, but I told her just to tell me if she saw a place she wanted to look around.
Wind phones offer a way to grieve lost loved ones, and the movement is growing fast
Then she abruptly told me to take the next right at a sign for the Hassayampa River Preserve. We had no idea what we would find. We paid the entry fee and started on a short walk — completely out of character for travelers who usually go from point A to point B with as little delay as possible.
She had brought some of the ashes along with her and she found a place she liked. Quiet, secluded and greener than I expected under a canopy of enormous cottonwood trees entwined with palms in the nearby wetlands. We moved on to complete the loop trail when she spotted it, a sign mounted on a tree, saying:
“If Someone is Using the Phone, Please Stand Back and Give Them Space
WAIT HERE FOR WIND PHONE ACCESS“
We looked at each other, wondering what that meant. An arrow pointed the way to a short path leading further into the grove.
A pay phone out in the middle of nature? That’s what we saw, but as we got closer we saw an explanation mounted below.
The wind phone is the brainchild of Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer from Otsuchi, Japan. Mr. Sasaki came up with the idea to help him cope with the death of a family member. For its creation, he said he did not draw upon any religious affiliation for the idea, but instead used it as a way to reflect on the loss of his beloved cousin. He stated, “because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind”. A year after Mr. Sasaki created his wind phone as his way of dealing with his personal grief, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami killed over 15,000 people in Japan. After the disaster, he opened his phone for public use, and the response has been incredible.
Since its inception, over 30,000 visitors have visited the wind phone to call their friends, family and loved ones. They use it to say what they never got to, or what’s on their mind, to introduce them to a new or special someone, tell them they miss them, or to simply say that they love them. Due to demand, there have been other wind phones erected around the world for various reasons. Give the current state of the world and all we have been through the last few years, and in honor of May as Mental Health Awareness Month, we have decided to up up our own phone. We wholeheartedly believe in nature’s ability to heal the body and mind. Please feel free to pick up the line and give it a try.
The explanation made quite an impression. My wife didn’t pick up the phone that day, and I wonder now if we’ll be headed back there someday.
As we headed back to the car, we talked to employees who were patrolling the trail. They said the phone is usually up in May, as the sign explains. But they had decided to put it up early this year. We passed by in the third week of April.
We got back to the car to continue our journey, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that we had found the right place — like it was meant to be.
Last week when I got a call that a cousin had died, my thoughts drifted to that Wind Phone. And I wonder if others were as touched by the thought of it as I was.
If there’s ever a wind phone set up in Las Vegas, I’ll be sure to spread the word.
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