Normalizing the grieving process
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.
Bowman said the phones can help a person cope with loss even if they are not religious.
“The idea of speaking your words into the wind and letting them be taken away in the hopes that maybe they reach the ears of the person ... It's just a nice way to have a conversation,” Bowman said. “I wanted to give people the opportunity to engage if they want.”
The wind phone will be in place at the Crossroads Campus from Monday, Aug. 28, through Sept. 1, alongside a new grief wall, a concept that Bowman is bringing back after a successful introduction last year.
Aug. 30 is National Grief Awareness Day, which Bowman said she wanted to commemorate with the wall and phone.
The grief wall will be covered with flowers and other decorations, and comes with a place where people can write the name of a deceased loved one on a paper crane and put it on the wall.
“There isn't going to be anybody manning it like last year; all the information will be very self-explanatory,” Bowman said. “’This is what you need to do, take your flower, put your crane up,’ and I'll have another explanation about the phone.”
Feelings of grief and sadness can be difficult for people to process, Bowman said, so the wall and wind phone are her ways of normalizing those processes.
While the wall and phone won’t be permanent fixtures at the Crossroads Campus, Bowman said she hopes the feelings they invoke in people will stay with them for a long time.
“I would like other people maybe not to get as comfortable as I am, but to have a little less fear and less discomfort being able to actually sit with it a little bit,” she said. “I am trying to normalize it. This is my tricky way of normalizing something that should have been normalized a long time ago.”
