Alone along a leafy trail at the Rye Nature Center between a sweet gum and a birch tree stands a wooden box that holds a forest-green rotary phone. A simple wooden bench sits beside it. Disconnected from any man-made network, the phone is designed to help people process loss by sending to the wind their messages to a loved one.
Called a Wind Phone, the device has been visited by more than 50 people since its installation in September, according to Rye Nature Center’s Executive Director Christine Siller. Many leave notes on star-shaped white parcels filled with wildflower seeds to be planted nearby. On a recent visit Siller found a stack of 30 notes; on top was one in a child’s handwriting: “Daddy.”
Friends Lia Buffa De Feo of Manhattan and Rye resident Sandy Samberg are the driving forces behind the local Wind Phone, the only one in Westchester County. After losing two children in 2015 and 2017, De Feo established and frequently visits a memorial bench at St. Lukes of the Field in downtown Manhattan where she reads letters to her lost children. “Talking to the babies I’ve lost keeps them close to my heart,” she said.
De Feo explores grief and loss on her Substack account: “Fly Bravely,” where in January 2025 she wrote about wind phones. The post struck a chord with Samberg, who as founder of Soul Ryeders, a local cancer support organization, has seen the way grief affects people.
“When I first learned about wind phones from Lia, the concept resonated on a personal level,” said Samberg, who approached the Nature Center with the idea. Samberg’s family foundation underwrote the project, but she credits Siller’s enthusiasm for bringing this vision to life.
“The bereaved process grief in many ways,” Siller said. “Nature holds powerful healing and restorative powers. We’re honored to provide this resource for the community — for anyone carrying grief, anyone wishing for one more conversation with the person they’ve loved and lost.”
Grief experts note that speaking to lost loved ones can help process pain, maintain connection, and support healing.
“Regardless of one’s spiritual or religious beliefs around what happens when we die, our relationships with those we have lost are ongoing,” said Andie Raynor a minister, author, and grief counselor. “Whether we continue to process those relationships in therapy or in prayer, whether we seek to communicate with the spirits of our loved ones through a psychic medium or by speaking to them in our hearts, most of us yearn for a way to feel connected.”
The original Wind Phone was conceived by Itaru Sasaki, a garden designer in Tohoku, Japan, to help him process his cousin’s death from cancer in 2011.
“Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line,” Sasaki told NPR’s “This American Life.” “I wanted them to be carried on the wind.”
Set on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Sasaki opened his Wind Phone to the public in 2011 after an earthquake and tsunami killed more than 15,000 people. Since then, thousands have visited his garden and wind phones have appeared across the world. By design, wind phones are placed in a natural, secluded setting, offering visitors a quiet space to speak from the heart to those they miss.
Rye resident Cliona Cronin was delighted to learn of Rye’s Wind Phone. Cronin, whose husband, Norbert, died suddenly in 2022, leads a local grief group with whom she visited the site. “To live in a community that supports grief is a beautiful thing. It resonated immediately,” said Cronin, a mother of two, who has long found peace, joy and solace spending time in nature.
Though a few years removed from the shock of sudden loss, she found the ritual deeply moving.
“There was something about walking quietly through the forest, searching for the site, sitting down in this bucolic setting and picking up a phone that begged a longer conversation than the more fleeting everyday thoughts,” she said. “I spoke to him as if he didn’t know what the boys have done.”
NPR correspondent Miki Meeks, who reported on the original Wind Phone, noted how so many who visit Sasaki’s garden speak to their lost relatives of simple and ordinary things — “I finished my homework, I completed the job, I’m still driving that car.” They share the everyday details that comprise a life — the details you would have told your husband, your dad, your friend.
In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which Joan Didion wrote after the sudden loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, she said: “I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death.”
Said Raynor, who has written several books on loss, including “The Alphabet of Grie”: “When we lose someone there are often things we wish we had said or regret saying. There are joys or troubles we yearn to share. It is hard to explain why speaking into a Wind Phone is so intensely moving and comforting to those who are missing loved ones. Perhaps it is in trusting that life and death are a mystery, that we do not know everything and that, like the wind, the presence of our loved ones can be felt even when unseen.”
