Geneva mom seeks to establish ‘wind phone’ in her late son’s honor

Geneva resident Elaine Haughan’s son James died of sudden cardiac arrest June 4, 2021, just three weeks shy of his 19th birthday and she would like to establish a wind phone in the city in his honor.

A wind phone is not connected to anything tangible. It’s a phone for people to talk to their lost loved ones.

Haughan spoke at the July 7 Geneva Committee of the Whole meeting. She said she has a team of people working with her to establish a wind phone. Not only had she lost her son in 2021, her husband died of cancer in 2019.

“It’s a symbolic tool for dealing with grief,” Haughan said. “It’s very good for your mental health for any age. Basically, it’s just like a phone, a rotary phone or ... it has buttons, tactile. And you install it out in nature somewhere where it’s peaceful and you can have some solitude. And it’s not connected to anything. Maybe it would be mounted to a bench or a post or something out somewhere in the community.”

A person using the wind phone would dial their lost loved one’s phone number and talk to them.

“Those words kind of get carried on the wind – which is the whole idea behind the wind phone,” Haughan said.

The wind phone would be for the community in memory of her son, she said.

After the 2011 tsunami which killed thousands of people in Japan, a woman put up a wind phone to help those who were grieving.

“We would design it. We would build it with city oversight or park district oversight. We could install it,” Haughan said of her team. “We have not figured out the maintenance part yet - something that would fall to a government entity or if volunteers would maintain it.”

As it happens, Fox Valley Hands of Hope in Geneva has a committee also working on a wind phone project, but Haughan said the two are independent of each other.

A national registry of wind phones, mywindphone.com. states there are 308 in the U.S. in places ranging from Equity, Alaska to Clearwater, Florida.

In Illinois, wind phones are at the Faith Community United Church of Christ in Prairie Grove; in Blue Mound in honor of Buck Parton, leader of Central Illinois Scouting; East Moline, in memory of Foster Atwood; Evanston, in honor of Oliver Leopold, at the Canal Shores Golf Course; and in Galesburg in memory of Rosemary Retter and Jim and Sharon Stewart.

“If we went ahead with this project, if you wanted, you could have our location added to the registry,” Haughan said. “It would be a gift to all.”

St. Charles resident Bri Mack is on the team helping Haughan with the wind phone project. Mack teaches family and consumer science at Geneva Middle School South, and Haughan is an instructional assistant in her class.

“We grew a really nice friendship over the course of time, working together,” Mack said. “She reached out to see if we could do [a wind phone] in Geneva, to memorialize her son, Jim. It’s really challenging to try to find a location.”

The trick is to find a location that gives a grieving person privacy, but not so hidden that you can’t find it, or it becomes a target for vandalism.

“You want people to acknowledge it’s there, even if you don’t want to sit and have a conversation,” Mack said. “The idea brings awareness, ‘There is this spot, if you need it.’”

James’ death hit his best friend, Liam Jackowiec, very hard. He said the wind phone idea is beautiful. The two became friends while at Geneva Middle School South.

“We hung out after school, played video games like Super Smash,” Jackowiec said. “We were in Boy Scouts together at Troop 37.”

They were tent buddies at Boy Scout Camp.

“Me and him were best bros,” Jackowiec said. “In high school, we still hung out. Then we would go for drives once I got my license. It was cool. ... We hung out the day before he died. We were at Mel’s Diner – it’s State Street Diner now. We went our separate ways. I said, ‘Hey, I’ll talk to you later.’”

He got the call about James late that night.

“My mom shook me awake. ‘Jim is in the hospital,’” said Jackowiec, who now lives in Chicago. “‘I’m there. I’m calling off work, my friend is in the ER.’”

He added his friend’s death “shook me up pretty bad. It was one of those things where if it was like a freak accident, a car accident, a tangible sort of thing you could blame or it’s like coming down with a sickness and there’s some dialog to it, you could talk about it. It was just kind of, one day I knew him and the next day, that’s it.”

While James was Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital in Geneva, doctors did an EKG - an electrocardiogram test of the electrical signals of the heart. One of the nurses gave Jackowiec a printout.

“I have a tattoo of a piece of his EKG – a little heartbeat – on my inner forearm,” Jackowiec said. “Losing someone so close to me, especially so young – tomorrow is not guaranteed. That’s the kind of takeaway I have from it.”

Anyone who is interested in the wind phone project can contact Haughan at jthmemorial@gmail.com.