MARYVILLE, Tenn. — If you have lost a loved one, you know how difficult the grieving process is. One cemetery in Maryville has found a way to try and make that process a little easier with help from a rotary phone.
Visitors can use the phone to call whoever they’re missing and speak with them as they work to heal.
“Over the years, we've had a lot of families that have transitioned outside of the traditional burying their loved ones,” Brittany Moncrief, family services manager at Grandview Cemetery, explains.
For more than 100 years, people have been laid to rest at the cemetery in Maryville. Staff like Moncrief said they’re always looking to expand the way they help honor loved ones.
“We really felt it was a huge part of the community just for so many years,” Moncrief said. “And it was important that we kind of gave them that area that they can come and not only be visiting a traditional grave.”
That includes cremation sites, an area for pets, a legacy trail and a reflection booth.
The booth is always open. When you step inside, you can use the phone to call your loved one.
“You are able to push it into the buttons, you are able to kind of have that feeling of that conversation,” Moncrief shared. “We’ve had loved ones that have come and talked about, you know, they made it into that person's alma mater or sometimes that's the first person that they told that they were pregnant, different things like that.”
Jason Troyer worked as a psychology professor at Maryville College for 14 years and helped establish the Wind Phone at the cemetery in 2019.
“It just tries to make a difficult process just a little bit easier,” Troyer said. “So often in a grief experience, so many things go unsaid. We wish we could have those final conversations. As we go through life, we have new things that we experience that we want to share with our loved ones who have passed away.”
Visitors can also use the reflection booth to write letters to people who have died, which are collected periodically and burned.
“People who lose a close loved one find that grief often lasts much longer than they expect it to. In our society, you know, we kind of get two, three, four days off of work,” Troyer detailed. “People may come to the funeral but they tend to go back to their lives pretty quickly and we're left thinking about our loved one every day and feeling like the world has completely changed. But the world seems to kind of go on without us.”
Finding ways to help people struggling with that feeling is a mission Moncrief said she’s happy to work toward.
“It's been very, very rewarding to be a part of the growth of the cemetery as well as really being a part of making sure that we are encompassing the families in any part that they will allow us to be a part of, especially in the midst of their grief,” she said.
Troyer said the idea for the Wind Phone started in Japan where a man set up a phone booth to call his cousin. After the 2011 tsunami killed more than 1,000 people nearby, neighbors started using that “Phone in the Wind” and the idea came over here to the United States.
There are several Wind Phones across the country. For a full list, visit this website.