The agony of words left unsaid can haunt us all. So if you could have one last conversation with a dead loved one, what would you say? Here, famous faces from Rob Rinder, to Jo Wood and Kelly Hoppen reveal THEIR deeply moving ‘letters to Heaven’

In the early days of raw grief, the longing for one final conversation with the person you have lost can be profound.

Some are haunted by words left unsaid, unanswered questions and the terrible pain of not getting to say goodbye when death comes unexpectedly.

The opportunity to sit with a loved one, hold their hand and say your final words is a painful blessing.

Regardless, as the years pass, the desire to speak to that relative or friend one more time inevitably creeps back.

As life moves on and children are born and you go through triumphs and failures, it’s impossible not to wish you could tell the father who died when you were a child about the person you are now, to reassure your teenage best friend she’s not forgotten or to simply say thank you to someone who made your life better.

It’s a sentiment understood so well by Si King, 59. one half of The Hairy Bikers, who lost his close friend and TV chef partner, Dave Myers, to cancer at the age of 66 in February 2024,

Earlier this year, he shared a photo to Instagram of an old-fashioned rotary dial phone that sits just above the blustery limestone cliffs known as The Leas in South Shields.

The cream-coloured disconnected phone offers passers by the chance to speak freely into the North East wind, uttering what they feel might have been left unsaid to a loved one – or a person they shared a more complicated relationship with.

He wrote: ‘Missing people can be hard. And sometimes, even when you are surrounded by folk, you can still feel like there are things you cannot quite say. Something like this gives people an outlet. A quiet place. A moment. A way of letting those words go into the wind.’

The spiritual concept that resonated so strongly with King is called a ‘wind phone’ and was born more than 8,000 miles away in the north Japanese coastal town of Ōtsuchi. 

The phone, a ‘kaze no denwa‘ in Japanese, was created by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in 2010, who installed a white telephone booth in his garden as a mechanism for coping with grief following the death of a close cousin.

A year later, following the devastating Tōhoku earthquake in the country, he opened the booth to the public to enable them to also find comfort while grieving via the symbolic one-way conversations. Sasaki’s idea has since been copied around the world.

Now a series of famous faces, including Rob Rinder, Jo Wood and Derek Redmond, have taken the theme of one final conversation and share their deeply personal letters to lost loved ones with the Daily Mail. 

Surprisingly hopeful and humorous, they’re a testament to bonds that have endured across decades and will never be broken. 

Click on the the letter icon in each image to read their heartrending words. 

Click on the the letter icon in each image to read their heartrending words. Rob Rinder supports Sudep.org, a UK charity working alongside those who have lost loved ones to an unexpected epilepsy-related death

Derek is represented by the London Keynote Speakers agency 

Ore now works closely as a Celebrity Ambassador with the suicide bereavement charity Suicide&Co.

Paul is now a leading keynote speaker with the Champions Speakers Agency