There is a phone booth in the middle of the desert in Joshua Tree. It was installed by Colin Campbell and Gail Lerner in honor of their two children, Ruby and Hart, who died in a 2019 car crash. It lives out there amid the tall cholla cacti and the wind that sweeps circles into the salt and sand. I have been thinking about this telephone lately, of how few spaces we have to offload our grief.

 

In her book, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss, Hope Edelman offers a handful of events that she believes have the potential to change the trajectory of a woman’s life. One of those is the loss of her mother. Along with Ruby and Hart, mine joined the stars in 2019.

 

Shortly after her death, my aunt Susan placed a stone with my mother’s name etched across its surface in a muggy graveyard on the outskirts of Goshen, Indiana. In this way, a memory of her rests alongside her parents, and I find this strangely reassuring. But it is quite possible that I will never visit that tiny plot in the Midwest, a patch that rests in the languid memory of both our childhoods.

 

She isn’t there anyway. She is in the ocean, and on the mountaintops. She is in my oldest son’s blue-green eyes.

 

And, truth be told, I don’t need a specific location to go speak with my deceased mother. I talk to her when I’m alone in the car, hiking through the wilderness, or making soup in my kitchen. I ask her questions in the middle of the night, after I’ve had a fight with my husband or when my children won’t sleep. I call on her when I feel lost.

 

Still, I sometimes think about that Wind Phone in the desert and what it would feel like to pull up the weathered wooden chair, to pick up the receiver and speak directly to the other side. Sometimes, our bodies need a physical representation of the spiritual. My body holds onto things my brain thinks we’ve already released.

 

Grief can be so desperately lonely.

 

And so, it was for this reason primarily, that I signed up for a retreat where I was encouraged to invite my pain inside, to mourn openly and in community with others. I’d had no idea how powerful this would be, how much I needed a container for my grief, a place to unpack my loss.

 

Grief is something Western culture often struggles to accept. We don’t talk about loss as something we carry inside our bones. My grief is the shape of my mother’s face, my empty womb, it is the color of scorched, unprotected earth, the sound of hungry, frightened children in far off places. It tastes like the tears of other mothers, sisters, daughters who are shouldering the burden of love. We forget that others can help us carry the weight of it.

 

Have you ever fallen to your knees on an open floor, felt the hand of a stranger rest gently on your shoulder while your body heaved, and known, irrefutably, that they were not waiting for your grief to finish, but simply holding space, letting you know you are not alone in the dark?

I carried a stone the size of an unborn child into the center of a circle, held it against my empty abdomen as I walked the spiral inward. And then I left it there, with a dozen others, in a rocky pile of collective sorrow, before I walked the spiral back out, hands open.

 

Many non-Western cultures, including those in Mexico, Ghana, Nigeria, and Indonesia, embrace this concept of communal mourning, with traditions that evoke a deep sense of honoring that allows the community to support the bereaved. Something happens when we embrace our grief as a vital part of collective healing: we begin to recognize the well-being of the individual as inseparable from that of the community.

 

It is how the living keep living.

 

Would I go visit my mother’s grave if it were closer to me? Maybe. Sometimes it helps to have a physical place to commune with the dead. If I find myself back in Joshua Tree, I might go in search of that phone booth in the desert, speak into the receiver and let it carry my deepest longing back toward the cosmos. Maybe if we had more places like this, scattered across the urban landscape, we’d learn to live with the dead, instead of relegating them to a single plot of earth, or a heaven we cannot touch.

 

This time of year, in the burrowing months of winter, we have an opportunity to tend to our grief and let it fertilize the future. I came home from that retreat with a shark’s tooth I’d found washed up on the beach. I kept it in a box on my dresser for two weeks, hidden away in the dark. And then one day I was peeling a tangerine in the kitchen, simple as a December morning, and I realized my mistake. I retrieved the bleached piece of prehistoric enamel and buried it in the garden. In the spring it will become mint and cucumbers, parts of it will exist in the summer squash I use to feed my children, my family, my friends, my community.

 

After I left the tooth in the garden, I picked up the phone and called my dad.

 

For more information on the Wind Phone visit https://rubyandhartfoundation.com/the-wind-phone/

 

For more information on the grief retreat in Chacala Mexico visit https://mardejade.com/retreats/full-spectrum-living-embodied-grief-and-wellness/