Four Ways to Make Grief More Bearable

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In 2010, a Japanese garden designer named Itaru Sasaki, who was grieving the death of his cousin, created an unconnected telephone booth in which he had one-sided “conversations” with the dead relative. He found it comforting to do so. A year later, when the earthquake and tsunami that overwhelmed the Fukushima nuclear power plant killed almost 20,000 people in his country—including about 10 percent of the population of his own town—Sasaki opened his kaze no denwa, or “wind phone,” to the public. The booth has received more than 30,000 visitors to date, initially those who used it to “talk” with their family and friends who’d been killed in the disaster but now almost anyone grieving the loss of a loved one, including tourists.

Grief can create a psychological, even physiological, disequilibrium so great that even a simulated phone connection can provide relief. And yet, grief is the most natural kind of suffering. We, almost 15 million Americans annually are experiencing fresh grief. Scholars believe that a more severe form, known as , afflicts about one in 10 bereaved people a year; this describes a condition in which the mourner’s suffering remains high over an extended period.