Okay, I think, I think I’m supposed to go this way.

It’s 4 p.m.

in Forest Park.

Everything here is remarkably yellow right now.

There aren’t many things that people, especially adults, get to do for the first time, and there are only a few things in life that come without instructions.

Death is one of the big ones.

If you’ve been through a profound loss, you’ll know, or maybe if you’re like me, and you’re just a generally anxious, chronic over-preparer, maybe you’ve been bracing yourself for the moment when your person or people aren’t around anymore.

I remember being seven or eight years old and spontaneously crying.

In my mind at the time, everyone died in order, and so I knew that one day my grandparents would die, and then my parents will, and then I imagined myself as perpetually eight years old and alone in the world.

So here’s to say I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of loss and the tools that I should be holding onto to eventually deal with the grief.

A wind phone, a rotary or push-button phone located in a secluded spot in nature.

People use it to call deceased loved ones.

Maybe they can say the things left unsaid.

The concept originated in Japan in 2010 when a garden designer built a phone in his yard so he could talk with a deceased relative.

Months later, the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami hit, and in a matter of minutes, more than 20,000 people died, and the designer opened his wind phone to a line of grieving neighbors.

In the United States, they started popping up in 2020 during the height of the pandemic.

Maybe something for my own toolbox.

I decided to look for the closest one to me.

Apparently it’s somewhere in Forest Park, Queens, tucked within the 500 acres of oak forest surrounded by city.

I follow the trail markers, splotches of yellow paint on the trees.

So, I am entering mile two of this walk.

Still no wind phone yet.

But does the phone work?

I talked to Millette Israeli, a psychotherapist who specializes in grief and loss.

Her midtown office is full of yellow light.

There’s a shelf of books about death.

There’s a white noise machine.

And there are two curly-haired dogs asleep on an ottoman.

This is Milton, and he is six.

And this is Rufus, and he’s 13.

Rufus had a brother who was seven years older than him.

And when Rufus was seven, and his brother died, he grieved.

Like I could see him grieving.

We all grieve.

That’s how Milton came along.

They’re good boys.

Milton also likes the woods a lot.

Millette actually recommends wind phones to her clients sometimes, either the one she put up on her own, 60 miles north of the city, or this one in Queens.

It felt like, in New York in particular, with how hard hit we were early COVID, that there was like, everyone was being collectively traumatized, and there wasn’t like a discussion of tools of how to manage that.

And I knew that the people particularly who were experiencing loss during that time were kind of feeling like their grief was on pause, because like either they didn’t get to be with their person when they died.

And it’s not just people who died of COVID.

It’s just generally like you were away from your family and loved ones, or you couldn’t collect, you couldn’t gather for the rituals.

And there is something valuable to ritual.

But the practice of going to a wind phone can kind of be a ritual in of itself.

It’s in the woods.

It’s this gorgeous shade, tree covered path.

And then suddenly you’re walking along and there’s a phone.

I’m here because there’s supposed to be a wind phone somewhere on this trail.

I think I see something.

I’m almost at the end of the trail when I find the phone.

It’s a blue rotary phone stuck to a pedestal against a tree on a bluff just off of the trail path.

It reads, phone of the wind, dedicated to Eddie Schneller.

I dust off the yellow oak leaf and dial.

I just kept crying.

I kept thinking about my friend Rosie who passed three years back.

She was walking her dogs and a hunter mistakenly shot and took her life.

I never got the chance to say goodbye to my friend, so when I saw the phone, I called Rosie and we talked until we were both laughing again.

Three of our children are deceased, and it’s been many years, but we still miss the wonderful people they were.

Picking up the phone was a simple physical acknowledgement of the law.

And as I put the phone down, my husband had to pick it up.

So many times I hear people say like, oh yeah, this amazing thing happened, and the first thing I wanted to do was reach for the phone to tell so-and-so.

I’m always big on encouraging people to just like talk, so talk to them.

But it feels weird.

There’s something about an old-fashioned phone with like a cord that’s attached to the wall where you have to stay there, and that’s a place for having a conversation that makes it feel like it’s a conversation.

And so it’s not just speaking out into the universe.

It’s speaking out into the universe with something that is a tool for communicating.

A different kind of tool than our cell phones.

Plus, there’s just something about going to the woods.

I think there’s a lot of people who refer to the woods as their church, and so much written about going to the woods.

Thoreau, Mary Oliver, has written a beautiful poem about when I go to the woods.

Have you read it?

I have read it, How I Go to the Woods by Mary Oliver.

The last lines read, if you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.

I kept thinking about Eddie Schneller, the person that this phone, the only one in New York City, is dedicated to.

I wanted to find the person who went into the woods with him, the person that loved him very much.

And while looking for signs of who may have put up the wind phone, I found Tom Laughlin.

He could be a pain in the ass, I want you to know.

But other than that, he was a good man.

Tom was Eddie’s acting professor in the late 80s.

It was his first time teaching when he started training Eddie’s cohort, the class of 1990.

And to the nervous, young, sometimes unsure professor, Eddie stood out.

If you can imagine such a thing, a student taking a professor under his wing, he was kind of the guy who wanted to, he wanted to show me the ropes.

He was boisterous and loud.

He had a take-charge personality and he could always find the optimism in a bad situation.

And even after Eddie graduated, he kept in touch with the professor for 20 years.

Because usually, you know, you have college professors and you may have a good relationship with them.

You may keep in touch with them, you know, for a couple of years after.

But after a while, we fade out of their existence.

You know, they got other things going on.

All you are is maybe, hopefully, a pleasant memory.

But, you know, Eddie took the time.

He took the effort.

There was something about our relationship that was unique.

They spoke often on the phone.

Eddie asked Tom for advice about becoming a dad.

They started a tour guide company together.

They were close.

But when I asked Tom about who may have put up the phone.

I’m as mystified as you are.

He has no clue.

You know, I didn’t know his family at all.

Never met his parents, never met his mother, never met anybody else in his family.

I never got any sense from Eddie that he was close to his family.

I can’t.

So it’s hard for me to say, oh, you know, one of his family members put it up.

It seemed like the end of Eddie’s life was shrouded in something that even Tom couldn’t peel back.

He was also, at that point, I can tell he was starting to get, you know, a little bit more and more depressed.

And I think his marriage was beginning to fall apart.

But as he was going downhill towards the end, he began to call me more and more and more.

And I would spend an hour or two hours on the phone with him trying to, you know, encourage him and keep him going forward and things along those lines.

He thinks that eventually the marriage did fall apart.

And then Eddie got sick.

There are some pieces of it now that I can’t quite remember.

There was about 30 of us got together on a Zoom conference like this and sort of had a memorial for Eddie, but that was about it.

I think it was only like 50 years old or just a little over 50 years old.

And, you know, most of us that were there, it just expressed this kind of sadness.

It really was a deep sadness that someone who, you know, loved life and loved all people and was always so optimistic just faded that way.

There must have been something in him that, you know, kept him from getting on his feet and staying on his feet and finding his way.

And I don’t know that I ever really found out what that was.

I think it’s going to remain a secret.

Probably if I ever use this wind phone, that’s the question I’ve asked.

I would ask him.

I would use the wind phone to say, Eddie, why were you having so much difficulty?

Tom led me in a couple of different directions to try to uncover who may have put up Eddie’s phone.

I reached out to the parks department, a couple of college friends, a priest in Long Island, his ex-wife.

No one seemed to know anything about the blue rotary film in Forest Park.

I think I wanted to find the person so much just to say thank you.

Thank you for the portal in the park in Queens.

For my own toolbox and on behalf of everyone else who has gone to the forest, happened upon it and found solace.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter to know who.

Maybe it’s more important to know why, which I think I understand now.

So I go back to the yellow trail and I dial just to say hello and thank you, Eddie.