Colin Campbell and Gail Lerner installed a wind phone in Joshua Tree to help mourners connect with lost loved ones. Photo / Colin Campbell via the Washington Post
Colin Campbell was driving with his wife, Gail Lerner, and their two teens along Highway 62 near Morongo Valley, California, when a drunk driver going 145km/h struck their car.
Ruby, 17, and Hart, 14, who were seated in the back, were killed in the crash. The family was on their way to their new home in the town of Joshua Tree that evening in June 2019.
On June 12, the six-year anniversary of the crash, Campbell and Lerner installed a disconnected rotary dial phone as a wind phone, where mourners can make one-way calls to people they have lost. They placed it in Joshua Tree – one of Ruby and Hart’s favourite places.
“The last thing we did as a family was pick that house,” Campbell said. “It became a grief sanctuary.”
They hoped the wind phone, placed near their home, would offer them and others a quiet space to connect with lost loved ones and move through grief.
“Anyone in grief can visit, sit down in the privacy of the vast desert, pick up the rotary phone and call their loved one via the cosmic connection,” Campbell explained.
The concept of a wind phone began in Japan in 2010.
After losing his cousin to cancer, a man named Itaru Sasaki put an old-fashioned phone booth in his garden to feel a continued connection.
A year later, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands, Sasaki moved his phone booth to a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Since then, hundreds of wind phones have appeared around the world, including nearly 300 in the United States.
Typically located in secluded outdoor spaces, they feature disconnected dial phones available for public use.
Campbell encountered a wind phone for the first time in October 2024. He picked up the phone and began to speak.
“I started talking to Ruby and Hart and weeping,” he said. “It was so powerful.”
He told Lerner about his experience, and they decided to build one themselves.
“We both said it would be so beautiful to have our own wind phone out in the desert,” Campbell said.
“I was really excited to make one,” Lerner said. “There is a rabbi named Abraham Joshua Heschel who said, ‘build your life as if it were a work of art’ and this seemed like a wonderful way to do that.”
They found a yellow phone at a vintage shop and later stumbled upon a glass cabinet at a second-hand sale in Joshua Tree.
They transformed it into a phone booth, complete with a notebook for callers to log their conversations. They timed its installation to coincide with the anniversary of the crash.
Lerner made the first call. She created a phone number combining Ruby’s and Hart’s birthdays. Then she began speaking to her children.
“I felt this rush, this deep connection,” Lerner said. “Usually when I talk to Ruby and Hart, I’m crying, shouting, asking where they are. But this time it felt different.”
“I was just telling them, ‘Hey, we miss you. Here’s what Dad and I are doing, here’s what we made for you,’” Lerner continued.
“It wasn’t like I felt them responding, but I felt like they were hearing it, and I felt like my words were reaching them.”
When actor Jamie Lee Curtis, who has worked with Lerner, shared a Facebook post about the wind phone, it resonated with thousands of people who responded with their own stories of grief.
“I will definitely call my son and daughter-in-law the next time we are in Joshua Tree,” someone wrote.
“A drunk driver ended their lives in December 2023. They left behind four beautiful young children who continue to struggle with the loss of their parents.”
Another commented, “This is amazing and so touching. I lost my son in 2005 at age 23 and there is not one moment of all the days since that I don’t miss my boy and wish I could just hear him say mom.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Curtis expressed admiration for Campbell and Lerner’s resilience.
“I am taken by what people do in the face of unimaginable loss and grief,” she said. “I can’t imagine that experience, and yet they walk it so beautifully.”
Curtis met the couple in 2020, connecting with Lerner through a creative project.
“I saw that Colin posted about the phone, and needless to say, it moved me - to see how people metabolise grief and tragedy into another realm of consciousness and compassion and understanding, and helping people through loss,” Curtis said.
“They are both artists, and they’re carrying on their children’s life energies through their own work.”
Lerner – a television writer and director – wrote a youth fiction novel in 2022 called The Big Dreams of Small Creatures, and its characters are inspired by Ruby and Hart.
Campbell – a theatre artist and professor of film and theatre – wrote a book in 2023 called Finding the Words: Working Through Profound Loss with Hope and Purpose. He also wrote and performed a one-man play shortly after their children’s deaths.
Together, they run the Ruby and Hart Foundation, a non-profit that promotes children’s literacy and storytelling, especially in underserved communities.
“Ruby and Hart loved reading,” Lerner said. “I think reading and being read to shaped their imaginations.”
They described their daughter as “brilliant, eccentric and an amazingly talented artist”. She was “proud and fierce”, and she stood up for younger children getting bullied.
Hart, Campbell said, “was this incredibly handsome, charismatic clown ... he was very, very funny”.
“They were remarkably close,” Lerner added. “He was a huge champion of hers, and she just really doted on him.”
A few months before the crash, Ruby told her parents they should consider fostering or adopting.
“She said there were so many kids who needed families, and we have such a loving family,” Campbell said.
About 18 months after the crash, Campbell and Lerner opened their home to foster children.
“We wanted meaning and purpose,” Lerner said. “A reason to be curious about the future.”
On June 17, Campbell and Lerner adopted two biological siblings, ages 15 and 14, both of whom came into their lives in 2022.
“Ruby and Hart would be so proud,” Lerner said.
People have already started visiting the wind phone, including Colleen Leonard, who came on June 22, after hearing about it on social media.
“I was really struggling, grieving lots of different people,” said Leonard, who lives in Twentynine Palms, California. “All sorts of people have been heavy on my heart.”
She called her friend’s daughter, Katie, who died in 2023 at age 15. She also called her cousin, Nick, who died at 19 in 2002.
“I just kept going,” Leonard said. “I definitely left there feeling less heavy … It was a little bit of joy, and I think sometimes, those little bits of joy carry you through grief.”
Campbell and Lerner said that’s exactly how they hoped the phone would make people feel.
If grief is love with nowhere to go, the phone can be a place for those feelings to land, even momentarily.
“We want to put joy out into the world,” Lerner said.
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