A Colorado cemetery’s red phone booth to the dead dials up tension over what counts as a memorial

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SILVERTON — Nancy Brockman was known around Silverton as a bigger-than-life character. So, it should have been no surprise that she decided to do death in a similar fashion.

When Brockman found out two years ago that she had uterine cancer and, beyond surgery, opted not to submit to treatments she had seen many close family members suffer through, she decided instead to devote her energies to planning her death — and beyond.

She purchased a plot on a rise in Hillside Cemetery next to the resting place reserved for the town’s mining-era soiled doves. And she bought a big red British-style phone booth rather than a headstone to mark that plot.

Both would turn out to be controversial in a town that is never known to pass up a good two-sided brouhaha. Moving into the afterlife on a plot near prostitutes was a matter for a little tsk-tsking. Placing a phone booth in a National Historic Landmark cemetery was a reason for a few to really get riled up.

“Get rid of the phone booth!!!” Carol Thompson Carlson Primus wrote on the San Juan County Historical Society Facebook page.

“Back to England you go,” Mike Palmer wrote about the booth.

But the red phone booth has remained in Silverton’s Hillside Cemetery, which isn’t your run-of-the-mill small-town burial ground. The nearly 150-year-old cemetery is not shut off behind iron gates and it has no orderly paths through it. Gravestones are scattered with little rhyme or reason on a steep mountain slope. It is riddled with sinkholes and toppled grave markers. 

Hillside, with its glorious view of the San Juan Mountains, is as much a town park as a cemetery. Residents walk their dogs there. They enjoy picnics on the benches or on blankets spread over the graves. Visitors enjoy browsing through the town’s colorful mining past engraved on stones that sometimes list the interreds’ reasons for being there — dropsy, slipped on ice, hit on the head by a timber, blown up in a mine, froze with 10 mules, hanged …

Brockman’s friends say the quirky nature of the cemetery suited her. She liked cemeteries in general and would make a point of visiting them on her travels. She was always dragging friends to cemeteries. Silverton’s was her favorite.

Whatever she did, she did it big. Hence, that is why we have a phone booth in Silverton.

— Lisa Morales, close friend and longtime employee of Nancy Brockman

Brockman, 62, had come to Silverton via a life spent working in communications. She began in New York City with an internship at Vogue magazine. She went on to work for banks and power companies before starting her own Chimera Communications advertising and communications company and moving to Durango in 1996.

She bought a horse ranch near Durango. Horses were her thing. So were Harleys. And boats. And small high-mountain towns. She bought a second home in Silverton that she dubbed the Hillbilly Hotel.

“Whatever she did, she did it big. Hence, that is why we have a phone booth in Silverton,” her close friend and longtime employee Lisa Morales said.

Design inspiration from Japan

Brockman’s phone booth idea was sparked by a concept of a phone linking the living to the dead that was started by Japanese garden designer Itaru Sasaki in 2010. Sasaki placed a phone in his own garden so he could communicate with a cousin who had died of cancer. He opened the phone to the public the following year after an earthquake and tsunami killed more than 15,000 people in Japan.

Sasaki’s phone sparked an international movement called My Wind Phone, which became a way for many more to communicate with those who have passed. There are no recorded messages on Wind Phones. 

The empty shells of old phones are akin to holding a seashell to one’s ear and believing you can hear the ocean. 

There are now 275 Wind Phone booths in cemeteries and memorial sites around the world.  More are added every week. My Wind Phone listings show the only other Wind Phone in Colorado is affixed to a tree on Aspen Mountain.

The phones inside Wind Phone booths have rotary dials or old-style push-button numbers, but they connect only to intangible memories.

The idea is that mourners can dial a number they might recall — or just make one up. They might speak into the receiver — into the silence on the other end. It is a disconnected way to connect with those who have passed, be they human or animal.

Brockman hoped the phone booth would be a good way for her many friends to remember her by calling her up to have a heart-to-heart.

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Brockman opted for a British-style phone booth because she had traveled in England and loved the bright red telephone booths. She told friends she would always duck inside one when she had the chance just to feel the steel and glass embrace of a stout red box that was steeped in history. She hoped they would have the same feeling.

Before Brockman handed over $4,000 for a reproduction British phone booth she found online, she asked town officials if there were any rules governing what could be in the cemetery. She was informed she could decorate her plot as she wished.

Last October, while she was visiting family in New Jersey, a delivery truck dropped off her phone booth in her front yard. Friends hauled the 400-pound booth to Hillside where they had poured a concrete base for it. They wanted to surprise her when she returned.

To the surprise of many, including Brockman, a rumble of opposition had been building after the booth was placed in the cemetery. Silvertonians who thought Brockman’s phone booth desecrated Hillside Cemetery took to social media to complain.

The fact that the town didn’t have specific rules that would outlaw a phone booth in the cemetery didn’t make a difference.

Like so many contentious issues, the phone booth dust-up was pushed before the Silverton Board of Trustees by those who wanted it removed.

Naysayers argued it shouldn’t be allowed because the cemetery could lose its historic status. That turned out to be untrue. Others said something that large and that red spoiled the serene nature of the cemetery and would interfere with their graveside contemplations.

The board voted to allow the phone booth to stay.

That vote came after Brockman called into that meeting to explain what she had hoped would be a gift to her town.

She also placed a full-page ad in the Silverton Standard newspaper displaying her impatience with critics and explaining her motives behind the Wind Phone.

“I envisioned the Hillside Wind Phone not as a monument to me when this cancer kills me, but as a gift to those who visit the cemetery, including my friends and family, but more importantly to all,” she wrote.

She wrote about history not just being about the events of the past, but being a living thing that continues to be compiled every day. She predicted in her ad that the Wind Phone would become a part of Silverton’s history and that she would be remembered as a woman who cared deeply about the town.

She was profoundly hurt by those who didn’t see it that way, her friends said.

“She would weep about it. It was all so painful for her,” said DeAnne Gallegos, a close friend of Brockman’s and the executive director of the Silverton Chamber of Commerce.

The phone calls out to others

Brockman died Aug. 18, a bit earlier than anticipated. She had been in hospice care for a year and had rallied in her last three weeks, going with batches of friends to favorite mountain haunts. She enjoyed dinners out with old friends who came from across the country to visit. She planned a trip to Laguna Beach, California, to dig her toes in beach sand one more time and to visit a fancy spa with girlfriends. She died two days before that scheduled trip.

Before she passed, Brockman had moved beyond the pain of the phone booth controversy, friends said, and had confirmation that her phone would be what she hoped.

In February, Silverton businessman Rick Noble — who is described by himself and others as “not hippie dippy,” “not woo woo,”  “not very spiritual” and not one who might go in a cemetery phone booth for an imaginary conversation — was inexplicably drawn to the booth the day after his beloved dog, Kora, died.

Noble was at the town dump for his regular Saturday trash run when he said he felt he needed to go to the phone booth immediately. He hopped in his truck, hightailed up the hill to the cemetery, and waded through knee-deep fresh snow toward the red booth.

As he got close, he saw dog tracks — a single set. There were no other prints in the new snow. The paw prints went to the red phone booth and stopped. No tracks led away from the booth. Noble entered the booth and picked up the receiver.

“I went in crying like a baby. I ‘called’ Kora, and I felt an immediate washing out of my grief. I felt her telling me it was OK,” Noble said.

Gallegos, who was out of town when Brockman died, went straight to the phone booth on her return to Silverton. She said she picked up the phone to say something to her friend. But she found herself at a loss for words.

‘What really threw me was the sheer silence on the phone. That was tough. It’s a dead phone. There’s nothing on the other end …” Gallegos broke into tears and couldn’t go on describing her experience in the phone booth.

Morales said she hasn’t been there since Brockman died.

“I am not ready yet,” she said. “I will be.”

“Everyone is going to want a piece of me”

Brockman’s friends are planning a big community party on Oct. 11 to celebrate what would have been her 63rd birthday. There will be music and dancing as Brockman wished. There will also be a ceremony at the phone booth. Friends will scatter her ashes around the booth. Those ashes include the contents of a vintage suitcase that Brockman had packed for the afterlife in the months before her death. Inside were special mementos she had asked friends to contribute that she could “take to heaven.”

Many of those friends will have their own small bags of Brockman’s ashes to scatter. Brockman had 100 decorative pouches made to contain ashes so each friend could have a bit of her to sprinkle into the Hillside breeze.

“I think everyone is going to want a piece of me,” she told Morales about her idea for the pouches.

During the ceremony, the word “telephone” at the top of the booth will be replaced with Brockman’s name and her birth and death dates.

Inside the booth, a message has already been placed above the phone. It reads:

“Calling All Angels”

Wipe your tears. Take in the view.

This Phone of the Wind is here for you.

Connect your heart to those you love.

The angels are listening in the winds above.

And this is where I find myself. - NB