COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- When someone experiences a loss, grief is a normal and natural response. Everyone, however, grieves differently -- some use journals, while others find comfort in joining support groups.   For those who want to just pick up the phone and talk to their lost loved one, they can find that right here in Columbus.    There is something so therapeutic about being able to physically pick up a phone and call a loved one. A woman lost her husband in 2023 to cancer and thanks to an old rotary phone, she gets to dial a number she never thought she would again.    Jean Christian made the trip to Kobacker House many times, mostly to meet with Tracy Lutz-Youger, her bereavement counselor. However, from time to time, she’ll pick up a phone and call her husband, Jim.   “I love picking up the phone and dialing his phone number because it just makes it so real to me that I can still get in touch with him,” Christian said.  In 2022, Jim was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer. Before dying in 2023, he spent 24 hours at Kobacker House, a place that provides hospice care, which is where you’ll find the CHAT phone. CHAT stands for Connecting Here and There.  “Probably the biggest thing for me is how I feel so close to my Jim,” Christian said. “You know, when I pick up the phone and dial it, I know I'm calling him. It never goes to my mind that he's not going to be on the other end because I always feel like he's going to answer and he's going to be there.”  Christian says that Lutz-Youger has been her lifeline.  “Probably the biggest gift that she has ever given me is just the acceptance of what I'm thinking and feeling is okay and that I'm not going to go crazy, even at times I've felt like it, but I just love her dearly,” Christian said.  “It's really meant as a creative mourning tool,” Lutz-Youger said of the CHAT phone.  She is the creator of the CHAT phone. It’s been years in the making and it finally came to fruition in June 2024.   “This concept is a way for people to not just talk about their person but talk to their person and foster the idea that even though the person's not physically here, they still have a relationship with that person,” Lutz-Youger said.  Part of the idea behind the phone also comes from conversations she’s had with her clients.   “A lot of my clients will say, I want to talk to my person, but just sitting on my couch in my living room or sitting in my car and talking to the air, I feel ridiculous,” Lutz-Youger said. “But you put that tool in their hands and that awkward barrier kind of goes away. I also think it's because people who are bereaved are mourning that physical contact with the person because they're not physically there anymore.”  Before the phone found its home at Kobacker house, Lutz-Youger actually picked up the phone herself.    “My mom has Alzheimer's,” she said. “She's alive, but she's in a memory care unit. For me, I don't literally hear my mom talking, but I instantly know what my mom would say to me to comfort me or to be happy for me and so I feel close to her in a way that I can't feel close to her when I go see her because she's not my mom anymore.”  Christian said she uses the phone to tell her husband about a number of different things.  “Sometimes it's been to catch him up on our family and friends or something that's going on with me,” she said. “Other times it's yelling at him about dying, wishing that, you know, that it had never happened, of course.”  When she’s done filling her husband in on everything he’s missed out on, she can hang up the phone, knowing he was right on the other end, listening.   Since June, the phone has been used many times by different people. It’s open for anyone to use.  One special thing about this phone is, once the company got done installing it and they learned about what it was for, they didn’t charge Lutz-Youger.  A QR code on the telephone will lead the user to the meaning of the phone and information about bereavement counseling and grief.  Lutz-Younger hopes to add more of the phones in the future and spread them around Columbus.  Anyone with a rotary phone they would like to donate is asked to email Lutz-Younger at [email protected].