Of all the words Merle Taylor might have shared with her son Chris but for his sudden death in 2018, there’s one that stands out. “We didn’t know he was going to die,” says Taylor of the 34-year-old, who suffered a brain aneurysm while on holiday in Bali with his wife and two young sons. “We were left with all these things we wanted to say to him but couldn’t – including ‘Goodbye’.”

Such regret was exacerbating Taylor’s grief when, years later, she came across an article about Itaru Sasaki, a Japanese man who had installed a glass-paned phone booth, housing an unconnected, rotary-dial phone, in the hills above Otsuchi on Japan’s Pacific coast. The disconnected phone had previously stood in Sasaki’s garden, where he’d placed it to facilitate his grieving after the death of his cousin from

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