My mother died in my home in hospice in 2020, on the day my state of Washington went into COVID-19 lockdown. Her body was taken away, but none of the usual touchstones for grief were available to our family. There was no funeral or supportive gathering, no deliveries of food and no hugs. For months afterward, as the nationwide lockdown continued, thousands of other families like mine saw these death rituals – society’s social supports for grieving – stripped away.
As a clinical social worker and health scholar with 40 years of experience in end-of-life care and bereavement, I knew that I needed some way to tend to my grief for my mother. While in lockdown, I began looking for resources to help me. Then I heard about the wind phone.
