Russ Young has a standing weekly telephone date with his wife, who died this year.

He calls Patricia Young every Sunday from a wind phone — an old, disconnected device that hangs on a pole in the memory garden at Columbine United Church in Littleton. It’s nothing fancy: a white handset and dangling cord mounted on a mustard yellow base.

When Russ picks up the phone, there’s no dial tone and no reason to dial, of course. But that doesn’t mean Patricia isn’t there on the other end of the line, somehow, someway listening to her husband’s voice through the wind.

“Patty was spiritual,” Russ says. “She wasn’t religious, but she believed in a creator. She believed after she died she’d still be able to communicate on this blue marble of ours. I take that seriously. I talk to her every day, and she communicates with me. She’s still there.

“That phone helps. It’s a more formal way of doing it.”

Russ installed the wind phone in 2022, inspired by Itaru Sasaki, a Japanese man so devastated by the loss of his cousin that in 2010 he set up an old-fashioned phone booth in his garden, complete with a nonworking rotary phone. Calling his cousin on the Kaze No Denwa, translated as The Telephone of the Wind, was a way to move through his grief.

The following year tsunamis hit Japan, destroying towns and taking thousands of lives. Many were swept out to sea, their bodies never recovered. To help assuage the grief of those whose loved ones had disappeared, Sasaki moved his phone booth to a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean and invited mourners to visit.

That story touched Russ Young and made him think about the memory garden at his church where loved ones’ ashes can be spread and visitors can sit on benches donated in someone’s name.

“You can take a break, meditate, think of whomever you lost,” he says. “That’s why I put it in there, so people could have a symbolic phone to talk with them. Little did I know 18 months later I’d use it myself because I lost my beloved bride.”

Inspired by Sasaki, dozens have fashioned wind phones and lodged them in various locales. Many can be found near serene sites such as cemeteries, lakes and parks, says Amy Dawson, who lives in Florida and New Jersey. In 2022, she created the My Wind Phone website (mywindphone.com) and began to catalog the increasing number of phones worldwide.

The passion project was driven by the loss of her 25-year-old daughter, Emily Dawson, who died in 2020 after a long illness. Amy, too, has a wind phone, though hers is private and sits in her daughter’s former bedroom. She talks to her daughter every Thursday, the day of the week she died. And when she’s near Princeton University, she’ll stop and use the wind phone on campus.

“It brings me comfort and allows me to tell her about my day and about her brother and sister and what we’re doing,” she says. “It feels so typical and ordinary, like what we’d always do. I keep her involved in our life. I know she’s around us.”

Maintaining the website is in homage to her daughter.

“I feel like she and I partner and do it together,” she says. “I make sure I connect people on Earth, and Emily connects the calls in heaven. If anyone is answering a phone in heaven, it’s my daughter. It really helped me with my grief, and I’m trying to help others.”

Wind phones aren’t only for those whose loved ones have died. Others use the phones as a way to talk through breakups and divorces, or to deal with the grief of a child going through addiction issues. They allow their words to float off into the ether rather than burdening the child.

“One lady calls herself because she feels like she lost herself somewhere,” Dawson says. “They’re healing, therapeutic.”

There are 205 known wind phones in the U.S., 96 elsewhere in the world and 14 on the way, including one in Mountain Vale Memorial Park in Cañon City. There are four already in Colorado, including an early phone on Aspen Mountain — whose creator remains anonymous because it’s in a national forest and they could get reprimanded — and one outside 1129 Spirits Eatery in Pueblo, installed by the restaurant’s owner, whose son was killed by a drunk driver.

Another phone resides in Silverton’s Hillside Cemetery and is at the heart of an ongoing controversy. Its creator, Nancy Brockman of Durango, decided to forgo chemotherapy and radiation after receiving a cancer diagnosis. Instead, she took her death into her own hands and secured a spot in the cemetery for her wind phone — a large, old-fashioned, red phone booth. The installation isn’t sitting well with nearby residents, some of whom don’t like seeing the brilliantly colored booth in a historic cemetery. But, for now, the phone will stay.

There are no hard and fast rules for wind phones, though creators do need to get the proper permission to place one. Dawson has answers to a list of frequently asked questions plus tips on the website, as well as photos of phones for inspiration. Other than that, the designs are open to the whims of their creators.

Some are simple, some are elaborate, such as the Ohio phone placed in a violin case. One creator put a rotary phone in the front of a boat next to a lake. A phone in Vermont is built into a bench.

Dawson has watched the phones grow in popularity and believes it’s because we’re all doing a better job with grief. She admires the Japanese and how they deal with death.

“The Japanese are good about the transformation of a relationship when someone dies,” Dawson says. “They approach death as a continuation of your relationship with your person in the afterlife, like you’re continuing your bond with them even though they’ve gone on ahead. They are still with you and a part of you.”