‘It’s okay, darling’: How calling my dead mother’s phone helped me grieve

I began leaving voicemail messages for my mother about a month after she died. It was February last year, during some of the darkest days of the pandemic for my family. My teenage daughters were mourning their grandmother while largely cut off from their friends and school.

There was something about the physicality of speaking aloud that dislodged some of my sorrow. Credit: Liz Rowland/illustrationroom.com.au

My husband and I were also struggling, drifting apart while cooped up in the same house together. And in my determination not to crumble in front of my girls when their worlds were already spinning out, I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, open the door for my own grief. It’s as if it were stuck deep in my chest, unable to find the space to surface.

Just after my mother died, my younger sister reminded me that Mum’s voice was still on the outgoing message of her mobile phone, which no one had yet disconnected. So, one afternoon while walking my dog in an open field, I dialled the number and heard her say, “Please leave me a message after the tone.” They were typical words, of course. But also so much my mum – her voice clear, steady, to-the-point. And when the phone beeped, I began talking, and then sobbing for the first time since her funeral.

I filled the two-minute voicemail, talking until it cut me off about how much I missed her, how much I needed her. There was something about the physicality of speaking aloud – rather than internally as I had done with my father, who died almost two decades earlier – that dislodged some of my sorrow. The air pushed out from lungs, my vocal folds vibrated, I heard my own words in my ears. It worked like a spoken prayer: slowing me down, giving sound to my pain and loss and, in the process, making me feel more connected to the person I could no longer see or touch.

After that first message, I called every few weeks or so. Sometimes I would tell her small things. That my oldest daughter kept a photo of the two of them on her desk at college. That my youngest had become fierce on the soccer field. Occasionally I phoned her from my home office, in the afternoon, after I met a deadline: “This is just the time I’d usually call, Mum. I’d try to have a funny story for you. We’d talk about the lousy weather.” As I spoke, I imagined her looking out her bedroom’s sliding glass doors, as I looked out my window. On walks, I would sometimes talk about more serious things – my marriage, my worries. I spoke cryptically, as if she already knew what was going on and I just needed her to be my sounding board.

It worked like a spoken prayer: slowing me down, giving sound to my pain and loss and, in the process, making me feel more connected to the person I could no longer see or touch.

My messages were inspired, in part, by the Wind Phone near Otsuchi, Japan, which I read about years ago. The white phone booth with a disconnected black rotary phone was created by a landscape architect in 2010 to help him cope with his cousin’s death. And when the tsunami hit Japan a year later, tens of thousands of people began visiting the phone, sending words to their dead loved ones in the wind. In the years since, people have re-created the concept, sometimes in reaction to other tragedies – a deadly warehouse fire in California or COVID-19. There are replicas on the Appalachian Trail and on a Colorado ski slope. So many people in mourning – telling a spouse, a sibling, a friend that they miss their voice, that the kids are doing well, that they doubt time will ever heal them.

Eventually I realised there was a pattern to my messages: they often reflected how I thought my mum would reply to me or the advice she would give. Like when I bought a piano and restarted lessons. “I just know,” I said into the phone to no one on the other end, “what your reaction would be: ‘Oh, I’m so thrilled for you, honey. That’s just the right thing to do.’ ” After I suggested to my siblings that it would be too painful to replicate Mum’s Christmas traditions, I left a message channelling my mum’s pushback: “‘Don’t be so sentimental,’ you’d tell me.” And after a hard week when I felt exhausted and my kids were struggling, I told her: “I know you would say get a massage and stop taking on everyone’s emotional stuff. It’s not all your problem.” Without being fully aware of it in those moments, I was invoking her words to internalise her guidance, something I’d done most of my life.

My private Wind Phone wouldn’t last forever, though. The bills for my mum’s flip phone were about $100 a month, and spending more than $1000 a year just to maintain a voicemail inbox didn’t make sense. But once it was gone, there would be no changing my mind. It was one more step – like selling her house, donating her clothes – in letting her go.

Late last year, I told my older sister, who was in charge of our mother’s bills, to close the account. Voicemail had worked as a transitional object in those early months after her death, helping me shift away from my mum’s physical self and toward a different kind of presence, in which her wisdom, her warmth, her common sense flowed like a quiet stream within me. And I knew I could keep the practice of sporadically speaking aloud to my mum without the phone. Still, I wasn’t sure if the line would go dead immediately or in a few weeks, and I didn’t want to experience hearing: “This number is no longer in service.” So, I left her one final message: “I will miss this, Mum. But I know what you would say: ‘It’s OK, darling. Time to move forward.’ ”

This is an edited version of a story that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

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