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Normalizing the grieving process

Tanisha Bowman, a social worker in Independence Health System's palliative care department, speaks Tuesday, Aug. 22 on a wind phone she is placing at the Crossroads Campus in recognition of National Grief Awareness Day. Eddie Trizzino/Butler Eagle

SUMMIT TWP — Tanisha Bowman plans to call her grandmother next week, even though she died in 2018.

The rotary phone Bowman will use won’t transmit her grandmother’s voice, and the cable isn’t even plugged into anything. But the act of picking up a phone and speaking into it as if her grandmother was listening on the other end could be a healing experience, and one which Bowman wants others to be able to partake in as well.

“At some point before I let it open to everyone, I think I need to break it in and make the first call,” Bowman said. “I have a lot of feelings about that right now, and I'm looking forward to that.”

Bowman is a social worker at Independence Health System’s palliative care department, and is setting up a “wind phone” between buildings at the Crossroads Campus, 129 Oneida Valley Road, for the month of September. The phone is put in place to provide a physical receptor to words people would like to share with those who have died, and wind phones have been placed in areas around the world, beginning in Japan.

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