This phone booth in Germantown is meant for speaking with the dead

If you could talk to a lost loved one over the phone, what would you tell them?

At The Thread, a new art and therapeutic installation in Germantown’s Vernon Park, visitors have the opportunity to answer that question. The Thread’s key feature is a small booth with a detached rotary phone, meant to simulate speaking with the dead or anyone else its caller may be mourning.

The project, which opened its first iteration in the Rail Park last year, is meant to make grieving more accessible, and to encourage more communal, public grieving.

“[It’s] the experience of holding something tangible in your hand in a way that you have communicated in the past, and to catch up with the person, share what’s going on in your life, tell them you miss them, laugh, cry, just be connected to them ... There’s something really powerful about your voice aloud,” said Beth Jellinek, a licensed professional counselor and one of the co-creators of The Thread.

“I don’t think our general culture does a great job of holding space for grief and processing it.”

The Thread opened this year’s installation on Saturday in a ceremony that featured live music, a grief ritual led by Salt Trails Philly, a local collective that promotes grieving as a natural process, and speeches and open conversation about grief from Germantown community members. Some said they were grieving the deaths of friends and mothers; others spoke about Gaza and Philly’s gun violence.

“We are not alone in grief. We are all holding grief and we can hold it together,” Jellinek said.

When Sonya Kearney and Janice Tosto ran into each other at The Thread’s opening event last year, they immediately decided that their Germantown community needed this installation, too.

“I feel like sometimes Germantown is overlooked, or it’s known for some more negative things or about the historical contents, but there’s a lot of grief work that’s being done in Germantown,” said Kearney, a psychotherapist who has focused on grief in recent years.

“My grief, my heaviness, and my sorrow were all welcome,” Tosto, host of G-Town Radio’s Grief Journeys show, said about her experience last year, when she was mourning the deaths of two of her friends.

Kearney and Tosto approached The Thread’s organizers that same day and asked that they consider Germantown for the next installation. Everyone agreed that it was an ideal fit — the original inspiration for The Thread came from the Wind Phone in Japan, where Itaru Sasaki placed an old phone booth in his personal garden so he could speak to a deceased cousin. Sasaki started inviting grieving visitors to his installation after the 2011 tsunami, but its private location created a sense of isolation. The concept has spread widely, and there are now Wind Phones all over the world.

The Thread’s team wanted to build a more open, public version. Hosting it at the Rail Park last year was a step in the right direction — the leaders originally filed for a three-month permit, but extended for an additional three months after seeing its popularity. The team members believed that grounding the project in a strong community, particularly one such as Germantown, where community members disproportionately navigate different kinds of grief, would ultimately yield more impact.

“Death and grief is universal ... but it does not affect our communities equally,” Ravina Daphtary, one of The Thread’s co-creators, said to attendees of the new installation’s opening. She described how experiences of racism and poverty add layers to a person’s grief. Someone from a poor Black and brown neighborhood might not only be grieving the death of someone they love, but also grieving for feeling a lack of safety or financial stress.

“We are all in some form of grief nearly all the time.”

Even while some carry more or less grief than others, Daphtary hopes people can use The Thread to share that burden together.

“It is a way we can stay in touch with our shared humanity,” she said. “We are all in some form of grief nearly all the time.”

At the Vernon Park opening, Kearney used the phone to talk to her sister and her grandmothers who have passed on.

“I found it cathartic and peaceful,” she said.

Tosto used the phone to talk to one of her friends who died by suicide. She told him that she doesn’t judge him for what he did, and filled him in on some good news in her life.

One element of The Thread continuing from last year is the installation’s voicemail. Anyone may call it with a real phone at 267-314-7161 to leave a message for their departed loved ones. The Thread’s leaders are planning to use the voicemails for a future project, and intend to host additional programming at the installation through the fall. At the opening event, they created recording stations for visitors to contribute their messages to the voicemail.

Leatha Whichard left a message for her son, Darryl Whichard. He was shot and killed in October 2022, and her grief is still evolving. Darryl’s son was born two weeks after he died, and she is choosing to look at the life of her grandson, now the only male in their family, positively,.

“I don’t even have a word,” she said about her grief. “I don’t want to say I’m happy, but I’m feeling more at peace.”

“My grief, my heaviness, and my sorrow were all welcome.”

She and her teenage daughter, Amira Brown, left a message for Daryl together.

“I just told him how much we missed him,” Whichard said.

“I just said it was me. I was there too,” Brown said. “It was nice.”

One of the walls of The Thread’s booth has transparent, open slots like a Connect Four board, where visitors can take red, yellow and green chips from a dispenser and drop them inside. As more people place their chips, it will create a brightly colored mosaic, symbolizing the grief they are holding or memorializing a specific loved one.

At the end of the installation ceremony, people placed the first chips of the mosaic, creating a layer for the next group of chips to land.