By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — Lynda Shannon Bluestein is nearing the end of her life. 

In January, the 76-year-old will travel to Vermont where, surrounded by family, she will end the suffering she has experienced from three bouts of cancer in a state where aid-in-dying is permitted. Bluestein, however, first had to sue the state of Vermont, winning her case in June, to allow a non-resident to end her life there.

On Wednesday, she plans to give the Westport Library a gift that may help others, especially children, express and process grief when they lose a loved one.

Bluestein will donate two “wind phones” — rotary-dial phones that are not connected to anything — that people of all ages can use to speak about their loss and memories of a loved one who has passed away.

“The wind will carry your message.” That’s how use of the phones is explained by a plaque at Ridgebury Congregational Church in Ridgefield, where Bluestein previously donated one of the devices.

A ceremony marking donation of the wind phones to the library will be held at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 13.

First used in Japan, wind phones are often placed outdoors, sometimes in booths where those grieving can reminisce about loved ones and process their grief. One of the Westport Library wind phones will be added to the “Library of Things” collection that can be checked out by patrons, and the other will be in the children’s department.

“I was immediately captured by the importance of taking both dying and the experience of grief out of the embargoed categories that we really don’t talk about,” Bluestein said during an interview Tuesday. “We’ve been told that grief is private.” 

She is especially concerned that grief is hidden from children. “They know something is going on,” she said. “Where do children go with their grief?” 

Wind phones work well for grieving children who start talking into the phone, and asking questions, she said. “It’s a really powerful thing to provide them with agency … The children intuitively know what to do.”

Adults, too, find solace when speaking on a wind phone, she said. “The words are just being sent in the wind because they need to be said.”

In addition to the library and Ridgefield church, Bluestein has arranged for a wind phone to be available soon at Green’s Farms Church. She also now receives frequent calls from libraries about acquiring wind phones, and has 15 phones on her dining room table ready to go.

Having a wind phone available in a library is effective, Bluestein said, because it is a place where grieving people can feel comfortable being alone, while others are nearby. She imagines library patrons might borrow a wind phone and walk along the Saugatuck River to speak about a lost relative, or take it to a partner’s favorite spot such as Compo Beach, she said.

When the phones were introduced in Japan in 2010, it took time for people to understand their use. But when the tsunami of 2011 struck and thousands were killed, survivors were comforted by the idea that, using wind phones, they could talk to loved ones and air their grief.

Bluestein gained insight into the importance of processing grief from personal experience. When her mother was dying, also from cancer, she kept her daughter and sons away during the last year of her life, which made the loss of their mother and the grieving process much harder. Unfortunately, that is the way many experience the loss of a loved one, she said.

“We hop on a plane or take a long car ride … that’s how many relatives of people who don’t have a planned death experience it — there’s no time to say, ‘I had a million things I wanted to tell you.’ ”

Bluestein, since becoming an advocate for medical aid in dying, is disappointed that although legislation has been introduced in Connecticut for more than two decades to permit the terminally ill use medical help with dying, the proposal has never been brought up for a vote by the full General Assembly. (The status of aid-in-dying legislation in Connecticut was the topic of a library program in October.)

So she went to Vermont, which had legalized medical aid in dying, but only for Vermont residents. After successfully suing the state to permit non-residents to qualify under the law, she has planned her own death there, complete with a pizza party for her family.

“I’ve chosen to have my son and granddaughters with me when I ingest the medication,” she said. 

“There are so many experiencing [a relative’s] bad death. I kept in mind I want my granddaughters to remember their kick-ass grandmother — that’s how I want to be remembered — not as a too-small little body in a hospital bed.”

For more information about wind phones, including information about where to locate them, visit the mywindphone website.

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Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist and journalism teacher for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman newspaper for 10 years and teaches journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.