Telephone in Priest Point Park helps grieving families reach out to those they miss

In a secluded part of Olympia’s Priest Point Park, a rotary telephone is mounted on a cedar tree.

The phone — unconnected to any network — is a telephone of the wind, a familiar device intended as a bridge between grieving people and their departed loved ones. The first such phone, in Otsuchi, Japan, is in a glass booth on a grassy hill overlooking the ocean, and thousands of people have visited it since it was installed in 2010.

The one in Priest Point Park was installed in October by Corey Dembeck of Olympia, who’d heard about the Japanese phone in an episode of the podcast and radio program “This American Life.”

“Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind,” Itaru Sasaki, who put up the phone after the death of a cousin, told “This American Life’s” Miki Meek.

Dembeck said the phone he installed had a surprising effect on him.

“After I screwed the phone to the tree, I kind of looked at it for a second,” Dembeck told The Olympian. “I felt kind of dumb standing in front of the phone and picking it up. I knew it was make believe.

“I stuck my finger in the dial and spun it around and then the words, ‘Hi, Mom,’ came out of my mouth,” he said. “And it made sense. It became real. I walked away and I felt better.”

Though his mother died in 2014, Dembeck said he felt the loss more fully during that metaphorical call than he ever had before. “Society isn’t geared to giving people mourning time,” he said.

He is grieving not only for his mother but also for his father and one of his grandfathers, both of whom died in the past 18 months. But it wasn’t his own losses that spurred him to create a space where people can express their painful feelings. Rather, it was the death of 4-year-old Joelle Rose Sylvester, a friend of his daughter Lennon, who is also 4.

Joelle died Oct. 6. She’d had flu symptoms, testing positive for strep and negative for COVID-19, but the cause of death remains mysterious, said her mother, Erin Sylvester of Olympia.

Dembeck installed the phone, dedicated to Joelle, on Oct. 7, just a few hours after he heard the news. He hoped that the device, and an article he wrote about it, would inspire people to help Sylvester and her husband, Andre, who was working out of town when Joelle died and is now working part time so he can be home with his family.

“For them to have to deal with that and then go right back to work and take care of their other kids, it’s a lot,” Dembeck said. “I wanted to find a way to give them some ability to spend time with their kids and not have to deal with reality for just a little bit longer.”

The family has been raising money through Meal Train to supplement their income and to do small kindnesses for others as a way to keep Joelle’s memory alive, Erin Sylvester said.

When Dembeck told the family about the phone, “I immediately just sobbed,” Sylvester said. “We knew we wanted to go … but we just couldn’t work up the courage.”

Then the online magazine Seattle Refined ran an article about the phone, and word began to spread. “We decided that it was time to go before the phone got vandalized or taken down or before there was just going to be too big of a crowd there,” Sylvester said.

Without any planning, she and her family arrived at the same time as Olympian photographer Tony Overman. “We showed up, and there he was,” she said. “I took it as divine timing.”

Though she’d tried to prepare herself for the pilgrimage, she found it difficult to pick up the receiver.

“I let my husband and the kids go first,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say.

“Even though I know she’s gone and I’ve said goodbye, this took it to a new level — knowing that I was going to pick up the phone and talk to her and not be able to hear her voice back,” she added. “I talk to her every day, but I feel like the phone just symbolizes it in a different way.”

Once she began talking, Sylvester knew what she wanted to say.

“One of the things I told her was that she had one job, and that was to make sure that all of the messages that came through her phone got delivered to the recipients,” she said. “I was able to daydream of her in her beautiful dress and running up to the person a message is meant for. … She would be so excited.

“Whenever I hear of anyone using it, I know that Joelle delivered the message or told the person, ‘You have a phone call.’ ”

Dembeck has heard from people all over the Northwest about the phone and received more than one request to create another. He plans to build one for an Oregon man whose wife died of breast cancer.

He imagines telephones of the wind throughout the region, offering people a place to express whatever they need

“The phone doesn’t have to be just for people who are dealing with the loss of a person,” he said. “It could be for a teenage kid who’s thinking about coming out of the closet, or it could be for someone who is dealing with depression or someone who is having an extraordinary amount of stress in their life.

“Sometimes, it can be important to verbalize things that you’ve never been able to verbalize or that you don’t feel comfortable verbalizing to others.”

If you want to make a call. you can find the park at 2600 East Bay Drive NE in Olympia. The phone is located off a side trail in the part of the park that’s away from the water. The closest parking is near the rose garden. The GPS coordinates are 4704’03.1”N 12253’30.1”W.

For more information, contact Dembeck through his website, Sojournlist.

This story was originally published January 17, 2021 at 5:45 AM.