Last March, Jimmy Wright celebrated 28 years of sobriety due to a former drug addiction that has left him floating in and out of homeless shelters since childhood.
He said his family was his salvation through his addiction. His mother, Julia Roddey, showed him tough love, and his brother, Jay Wright, never judged him through it.
When the Wright brothers lost their mother to cancer, Jay told Jimmy that they had to stay together, that Jimmy couldn’t leave him alone. However, last year Jay told his brother that he too had been diagnosed with the disease. He died a few months later, just over a year ago.
“We just loved each other the way we should,” Wright said. ‘Last year he finally told me he had cancer and that it ran in our family, and I’m having a hard time dealing with his death – harder than my mother’s. We were so close.”
Tracy Lutz-Youger picks up the receiver on the CHAT phone, a communication tool that grieving people can use to connect with those they have lost.
Since his brother’s death, Wright has been working one-on-one with Tracy Lutz-Youger, a grief counselor at OhioHealth, who works with clients in central Ohio and started the CHAT phone program at OhioHealth this year.
The program stands for ‘Connecting Here and There’ and installs rotating telephone booths in a natural environment so that a physical symbol can speak to grieving people as if they were speaking to those they have lost.
“By talking about your person you keep the memory alive, but by talking to your person you cherish the idea that even though he or she is not physically present, you still have a relationship with him or her,” says Lutz-Youger.
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“It’s a tool. It’s not like I have a phone number to heaven; it is a creative means of grieving.”
About Wright, he said that sometimes he cries and sometimes he laughs, but the phone helps him reminisce about his childhood with his brother.
“I feel like I’m with him when I’m on the phone,” he said.
“She (Lutz-Youger) gets things out of me that I didn’t think existed in me. She is good at what she does. She came up with this phone idea and for someone to come up with this phone idea and pay for it out of their own pocket, that’s an angel.”
Three years later, the first official telephone was installed in June in the memorial garden of OhioHealth’s Kobacker House in Columbus. It was there where Jay Wright breathed his last, and Jimmy had a memorial stone placed in his brother’s honor.
Lutz-Youger said her customers, like Wright, come on site to use the phone. Although some may feel strange about it at first, having a physical space and an object to hold helps the grieving process.
Jimmy Wright has a memorial stone in the Kobacker House garden for his brother Jay Wright, who passed away in 2023.
“There’s something about holding a phone in your hand, an old rotary phone, and being outside in that natural environment that breaks down that barrier and that awkwardness,” Lutz-Youger said.
Before the CHAT phone was an official program, Lutz-Youger picked up the phone himself. Even though she is a grief therapist, she has dealt with deep losses herself. Her mother now has Alzheimer’s disease and is in a memory ward.
“When I first came up with the idea, before I came up with the concept for the booth or anything, I had an old rotary phone in the house and I live in the woods. “I put an old rotary phone in a tree by my creek, with a chair next to it,” she explained.
‘She’s still alive, but she’s not my mother. The disease really destroyed our relationship in terms of mother and daughter and adult friends – she was my person who I called with exciting news or with sad news, and so when I use my phone that I have at home, under normal circumstances I would use I call my mom and talk to her.”
Tracy Lutz-Youger stands with her creation, the CHAT phone, in OhioHealth’s Kobacker House. This payphone containing a rotary telephone gives grieving people a physical tool to connect with those they have lost.
OhioHealth saw success with people using the phone and placed a QR code on the side of the booth to provide information and resources related to grief.
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Lutz-Youger now wants to expand the program and is looking for donations of rotary phones and natural spaces, such as possibly the park system, where she can install the booths. She said people often report more connection with their loved ones when they are in nature.
“I really want to change the way our society responds to grief and provide healthy grieving strategies,” she said. “If we all recognized that we are all dealing with loss and change and that grief is universal to humans, perhaps we would be kinder to each other.”
She asked people to contact her via email at reach4gief@gmail.com to donate rotary phones to the CHAT program.
The Columbus Foundation’s Center for Humanity.
This article was made possible through support from The Columbus Foundation’s Center for HumanKindness, which partners with The Columbus Dispatch to profile those who make our community a better place. Help us inspire kindness by suggesting people, initiatives or organizations that reporter Sophia Veneziano can profile. She can be reached at sveneziano@dispatch.com. For more information, visit Dispatch.com/Kindness.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: OhioHealth consultant creates CHAT phone to help grieving people heal
