How Long Does Grief Really Last? Moving With It, Not On From It: J.S. Park

J.S. Park:
Loss is so scary that people don’t know what to do with the discomfort, so they whistle past the graveyard or they put a one-liner into the silence or they try to smooth it over or they pull theological future hope over present suffering in order to self-soothe. Because when we see that abyss of mortality creeping in, we do everything that we can not to look it in the face.

Gary Schneeberger:
Our guest this week, J.S. Park, has devoted his life to helping people not turn away from grief, but lean into it. Not to move on from it, but to move with it. In his more than a decade as a hospital chaplain who has attended hundreds of deaths, he works closely with the friends and family they leave behind to give them permission to grieve. It feels funny to say, “I permit you to,” he explains, “but it’s my job to let them know we can do this together and it’s possible to make it through.”

Warwick Fairfax:
Well, June, it’s great to have you here. June is J.S. Park. And June is a hospital chaplain, a former atheist agnostic, six-degree black belt, suicide survivor, Korean American, and follows Christ. That’s quite a mouthful. He has a fascinating story.
So June currently serves at 1,000-plus-bed hospital, one of the top-ranked in the nation, and was also chaplain for three years at one of the largest nonprofit charities for the homeless on the East Coast. June has been interviewed by multiple different folks, CNN, NBR, CBS, Good Morning America. He’s the author of a number of books. The most recent one is As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve. He’s also wrote a book, The Life of King David, The Voices We Carry, How Hard It Really Is. So a number of different books. And he’s also a board-certified chaplain and has an MDiv and a BA in psychology. June currently lives in Tampa with his wife, a nurse practitioner, and their daughter and son.
So, very much looking forward to our chat, as I mentioned off-air. I have a small window into what you do just because I have a daughter that’s a child life specialist at a hospital in New York that works in the PICU. What’s that, pediatric intensive care, something like that. So comes alongside kids and explains procedures to their parents and all.
So June, so tell me a bit of the backstory of how you became a hospital chaplain. I’m guessing you grew up in the Tampa area, did you, or in Florida?

J.S. Park:
Yes, born and raised in Florida and became a chaplain I guess by accident a little bit.

Warwick Fairfax:
So tell me, what was life like for you growing up? And hopes, dreams, parental influences. How do you connect the dots of how you grew up and becoming a chaplain?

J.S. Park:
If I could extrapolate backwards, I think if someone sat me down and said, “In five years, you’re going to have seen hundreds of deaths and tended to those who are ill and injured and dying and working level one trauma, gunshots, fire, fall, stabbing, car accident, stroke,” I may have walked out of that job interview thinking nobody could do anything like that. You were talking about child life specialists, they see so much too.
And so how did I fall into a job like this? And when I think back to childhood and how I grew up, I guess I could almost trace a straight line through it because I grew up in a very turbulent, violent household. I know that my parents loved me, but similar to many stories, especially with parents who are more traditional, they had a lot of unresolved, unmetabolized trauma ancestrally from coming from a country that was colonized and war-torn and didn’t have the resources to work through that. And so when they had children, my brother and myself, on one hand, I know that they loved me, but on the other hand, it had a limit to how much they could show that and provide that within the traumatic bodies in which they lived.
And so I grew up in an almost like a dual role in that on one hand, I was a target for a lot of their abuse, but I also became their translator. And in some sense, when people would try to rip them off or see that they couldn’t speak English very well, they would try to scam them, I’d see that all the time. I’d actually wait by the mailbox and sometimes intercept the mail because my parents assumed all junk mail was stuff they had to fill out. So they’d be putting their bank account numbers in there and things that I’d have to tear them up before they got them.
So on one hand, I was defending my parents, on the other hand, being abused by my parents, and what a conflicted dual role that that is that I’m sure many immigrant families, many poor families, just any family would experience with parents who have that trauma that’s living in their body. So I grew up wanting to be the voice that somebody needed. I grew up wanting to be the voice and the peace and the presence that I didn’t get to have. Everything was so unpredictable growing up. And again, I say this with all love in my heart for my parents. I know that they couldn’t be the unburdened versions of themselves. And as they get older, I’m seeing that they are becoming more healed and liberated.
But I get to be hopefully some presence of healing and liberation for the people that I see. And so I’ve always believed the experiences that we have in our lives can become a lighthouse for other people so that, as they’re navigating the roiling ocean, that they at least have people ahead of them that have maybe gone through what they’re going through to be a light for them. And I’m glad and grateful to be that.

Warwick Fairfax:
From what I understand, you’ve been a chaplain for a number of years and you deal with, gosh, death, dying, illness. Just every day is a challenge. You see people in their darkest hour, patients dying, family members grieving, grieving, anger, the whole gamut of emotions that you write about. Grieving a parent who was a wonderful human being, grieving a parent that maybe they feel wasn’t as wonderful from their truest perspective.
But from what I understand, pretty early on, I think it was month 13, you had your own almost crisis of faith. Talk about that because I don’t know if it’s like going into battle, which I’ve never served in the military, but you can hear about what it’s like to be in battle. You can hear about what it’s like to be a chaplain, but you can’t fully know until you’ve actually been there, if you will. So what was it like? Just at month 13, what happened? I don’t know if… Why did it happen? But just talk about that because that was a very challenging time.

J.S. Park:
I think most people enter into spaces or new endeavors with a very particular expectation often romanticized about what will happen. Whether that’s a new parent, people who are just getting married, people who are starting the job that they work so hard for, we enter into these seasons with such wide eyes. And for me, I entered into chaplaincy with such wide eyes about I just want to help people and get to that montage, the Hollywood high-fives, and everybody just saying, “Yeah, thanks for the prayer. It was so moving.” And if I preach a sermon, I get the slow clap, that sort of thing. I just imagined all of that sitting with the chaplains. “Crosses and communion wafers, up on three. Here we go.” I just had this idea of what it would look like.
But when I got into the internship and then the residency, so month 13 of my chaplaincy, by that point, I had seen so much dying. And it wasn’t just dying. I could understand that people suffer. I could deal with the fact that people were dying, but it was the extent and the extremity and the unfairness of the suffering that I saw. I thought this person can’t suffer any more than they are, and then they would suffer even more. And it started to look haphazard and chaotic and random, unjust. And my idea of the cosmos or the universe or of God holding things together and having a plan, that became Swiss cheese. It just started falling apart.
And I remember watching this code blue, a code blue is a resuscitation to bring a patient back to life if their heart rate drops to zero, I was just praying and praying because by month 13, I had seen so many code blues and I had not seen a single successful resuscitation. In the movies and TV shows, there’s a study that I believe about 75% show a successful resuscitation, but in real life, I think the number is less than 5%. And even those who are resuscitated, they have irreversible damage because of hypoxia, because of ribs being crushed from the compressions. So I’m watching and I’m praying and I’m saying, “God, just this one time, just please show us a miracle. Can you just blink in our direction? Do you see us?”
And so my ideas, my very shallow, wafer-thin ideas of God and theology and is the universe bent towards goodness, that started falling apart. And I did lose my faith. I talk about that in great detail in my book, and I think in chapter two. And I have lost my faith several times since and I’ve come back around each time, but if my faith was a box and it gets blown up, it came back looking different every time. We each still have a box, but now my box is a very misshapen trapezoid. Maybe at this point, a rhombus. It just looks different every time. And every time it comes back together, I think it becomes expanded and holds more than I have been able to previously. Even the ways that people grieve, even the ways that I speak grief language with other people, the situations and the pain that I see, I’m able to hold more.
There’s this study about, I believe, earthquake disaster survivors in Pakistan. I could be quoting that wrong, but it is about disaster survivors. They tried to study how did they experience post-traumatic growth, and the ones who had their worldview shaken but experienced post-traumatic growth, they found that in their worldview, they were able to hold two opposite truths at the same time. So for example, the world can be terrible, but God is still good. Or bad things can happen for no reason, but good things can still happen too.
And so my faith, my worldview has been able to hold these opposing thoughts. Here is evil. Here is something unjust. Here is this patient who went through this injustice, or here’s cancer randomly popping up and suddenly replicating in their body. Completely unfair. But at the same time, love can stretch over all of this. Love is still real. God’s love is still real. I can still tend to these people. We can still find autonomy and choices and make decisions in this horrific situation that bring dignity.

Warwick Fairfax:
Just before we move on here, one of the things we didn’t get into detail is I just want people to understand how bad it was when you talked about that crisis of faith. You were seeing dying people who were in situations where it was just unfair, stabbings, gunshot, car accident, strokes. You actually had mentioned you began to almost see people, it was… The level of trauma, if you will, that you were going through, it wasn’t just some intellectual crisis of faith. How could a good God allow suffering? That would be huge, but it was beyond just a mere intellectual, I don’t want to say mere, but it’s beyond an intellectual crisis of faith. This was getting you at your very core. When you start seeing visions, a psychologist would say, “That’s probably not good. There’s something going on here.” Right?

J.S. Park:
Yeah. I did develop over time from my work death anxiety. It’s an existential panic. I knew it was happening because I would look at clocks and see seconds pass, and I would get obsessed with time. And every second that passed, I would say, “Oh, man, that’s one more that’s gone.” I would ruminate on it over and over. It was an intrusive thought.
And then I would be, for example, in traffic, and I would look at a car full of people, and then I would picture suddenly, I could almost see it as clear as day, the car flipped over and all four or five of them injured, or I’d see them in the morgue. And then I would wake up 2:00, 3:00 in the morning in a panic and lean over my wife to check if she was still breathing. And I had dreams of all my patients all the time, mostly those who have died. And some would talk to me, some wouldn’t. And in the dreams, they would just get closer and closer until I would wake up.
And it got to the point where I started hearing, I’ve talked about this before publicly, started hearing my patients who have died in my car or at night in my house. I work a late shift, I’d come home 2:00, 3:00 in the morning and I would hear them before I slept or as I turned the corner. And on one hand, I have to say how overwhelming it is to deal with something like death anxiety. They constantly just see it up close, not just death anxiety, but seeing the degree of suffering that people go through and seeing death over and over.
I was working during the pandemic and the front lines. I was there for 2021, the Delta variant. I think at one point, we were probably seeing 50 patients die a week. I was diagnosed with PTSD specifically from that time. So I have to say, as maybe much of a, quote unquote, downer as this is, that is what happened.
But I can say this, inversely, having been confronted with death face to face where I cannot look away, when I sit with someone like my wife or my kids, my friends, I have this thought that’s prominently front and center. This could be the last time. This could be the last time I sit with them, laugh with them, because anything can happen. I’ve seen all the ways that anything can happen. I’ve seen the ways that youth does not guarantee a long life. I’ve seen the ways that trauma can suddenly slip through the window and here’s the abyss of mortality, just like a sudden sinkhole clapping right open.
So when I sit with my wife or my kids, there is a richness and a texture with them. There is a presentness that I don’t think I could have experienced unless I was faced with death all the time. And things like my obsession with time or things like hearing the dead, maybe those can be overwhelming, but those are also signals or indicators or maybe signposts to me that it is all precious and it is all going, and time is going fast. And all the dead who have died, I’m remembering them because it’s my body’s way of grieving them and honoring them, of keeping their story. And it’s okay if they visit. I don’t mind that they visit.
And so all these little things that I felt like were anxiety, it’s still tough, it’s not easy, but at the same time, they’ve all been teachers, they’ve all been educators about how I can live. And so the thing I can say is that I’ve learned as best as I possibly can to not wait. Just don’t wait because you just don’t know. If there’s the thing that you need to say, if you see injustice and you feel scared to speak, if there are people in your life like, “Oh, I want to just see what they’re up to,” it’s okay to send that text message and just say hello and that’s it. So there are some things where I’ll send a text or something to somebody and they’re like, “Oh, did you see another patient die recently?” They know now. And I shouldn’t make that joke. I know that’s morbid.

Warwick Fairfax:
No, I get it.

J.S. Park:
But they know that I’m just… I’m constantly actively in this work and I’m always just so appreciative. Hey, I’m here another day. What a miracle that is.

Warwick Fairfax:
Wow. So let’s probably move on from this. One of the things you’ve mentioned is, as tough as it was seeing people that you didn’t know die and go through suffering, you mentioned that one of your good friends, John, showed up and was in a terrible accident. It’s one thing when it’s some random person, you can grieve for people you don’t know and care for them, but when it’s somebody you do know, that just takes probably the pain to a whole other level. So just talk about that because that must have been one of the worst moments in your life, just seeing John and having to be with somebody you knew so well.

J.S. Park:
Yeah. If I can tell you about John, he was one of my best friends. Tall, blonde, good-looking guy, so full of energy. And you always knew when he was coming. He had just this lumbering larger-than-life footsteps, such a loud laugh. The hardest I’ve ever laughed in my life was with John, because he was such an interesting… And funny without trying. Just the way about him, he was so funny. And he had a very young daughter and was always so curious.
And I remember one time he sent me a text message, it was a video, and I couldn’t see it too well because it was so dark. And it was just him holding something over his head. And so I texted him back, “What am I looking at, John?” And he said, “Oh, I found some bricks outside, so I’m working out with them.” He was just that kind of funny person. And gosh, that made me laugh so hard, but he was also so serious about it.
And I remember one time John saw me give this presentation, and this was back maybe in 2018, he saw me give a presentation and he was enraptured the whole time. And then at the end, he came up to me and he was like, “Hey, why aren’t you famous? You’re so good at this.” And I laughed because me maybe just feeling sheepish about that as, “Oh, you’re so funny.” But he was so serious. It’s like he looked at me and he just saw a star or something. But that’s how John was. He just saw stars all day long.
And then I remember getting the call from my supervisor saying, “Hey, are you somewhere where you can be seated?” And you know when anybody tells you that over the phone, it’s not because they’re telling you they got a promotion. So sat down, and I was at work and she said, “Look, John’s been in a very serious accident and he’s at the hospital. I don’t know what his status is, but if you could visit him and his family.” And this is going to be true of anyone, you can be in a role that is functional, but as soon as it’s proximal, as soon as it hits close to home, of course it’s going to be too real and too raw.
But I saw him, and when I saw him, I had been working long enough to the point where I knew he wasn’t coming back from what he had endured. He was intubated, on life support. And for the five days that he was at the hospital on my assigned floor, Room 51-16K, a room that I still visit sometimes, I attended to his family for those five days. And that fifth day, his parents made a horrific, the hardest decision that any parent could ever make to say goodbye to their son.
And I still speak to John sometimes just out loud. I have a voicemail from him that I’ve kept. I play it once in a while. And can I tell you, he has a brother named Mark. To this day, it’s been about seven years later, Mark and I still meet for lunch. We didn’t know each other before that, but I met him at the hospital and I told Mark, I said, “John and I had plans to go get Korean barbecue together and we never got to go.” And Mark said, “Why don’t we go?” I said, “Let’s do it.” Seven years later, I just saw him actually last week, we’re still getting Korean barbecue together. What a beautiful thing that emerged out of that.
And so I don’t know if I’m answering a question, but I feel so happy to talk about John and just… We learn so much about grief, but that grief is you got to let go and turn the page and forget the past. And how do you move on without them? But for me, grief is not about letting go. It’s about letting in. We don’t move on, we move with. And so with John, I’ve kept his memory front and center. In all the ways that he lives, I want to honor his life, and his life has become a part of me. So rather than letting him go, I’ve expanded more because of the memory of John and the way that his memory is a blessing.

Warwick Fairfax:
What you’re saying is so profound, and you write about obviously grief quite a lot in your most recent book, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve. You talk about being a grief catcher, a catcher of stories. What you just said, it’s not about letting go, but letting in, this idea that we need to man up, buckle up, let go, don’t cry. Especially in our culture for men, you’re not meant to show tears or sadness. You meant to be tough, whatever that means, which is not helpful. But I feel like that’s profound as just it’s okay to grieve. And I think you write somewhere that you never really stop grieving.
In my own small case, I remember, I was a child of my father’s third marriage, so he was a lot older. So he died in early 1987 when I was 26, but he was in his 80s. At that point, obviously there’s more chance of passing away. And so we had a good, close relationship. I think about him often. It’s decades later. Is there still grieving? Sure. I’m proud of so many of the things he did well. There’s a couple things maybe, “Oh, Dad, I wish you’d…” There’s a whole series of emotions that are there, but overall, I just feel blessed to have him as a father. And I think about him and my kids never got to meet him and my wife missed meeting him by one year. She’s American and came to Australia.
We all have our stories, but you don’t stop thinking about the person or grieving the fact they’re not around. This is decades later. And it wasn’t a complex relationship. He was not perfect, but a good guy. It wasn’t some horrific tragedy. It was prostate cancer, but at that point in life, it’s a fairly, I won’t say normal, but nothing momentous about how he passed away. Very common way to pass away, but yet there’s still grief.
Does that make sense? That grief isn’t just shutting off emotions-

J.S. Park:
Absolutely.

Warwick Fairfax:
… it’s just there’s nothing wrong with grieving somebody decades later. And it could be a more complex sea of emotions than I just described, but it took a bit about really some of the essential tenets in your writing about grief, because it seems like it turns conventional wisdom on its head.

J.S. Park:
Yeah. I’ve noticed that, you could call it the Westernization or modernization of grief and that grief is rushed, and you see it not just in church culture, but you see it in pop culture. In church culture, it may be, “You need to let them go,” or, “Everything happens for a reason,” or, “It was their time,” or, “This is going to refine you in the fire,” that sort of thing. But then in pop culture, you also see, “Don’t cry. It’ll be all right. You need a stronger spine, not a lighter load.” We say these things about grief and about pain, about trauma, but grief is so hurried and bypassed. And I read some time ago that the average workplace manual in America allows for four days of bereavement if your spouse or children die, which means if your closest family members die on Sunday, you better be back to work by Friday. And institutionally, religiously, we just rush past grief.
And it used to enrage me when I would see this sort of thing, but I’m starting to have more compassion for it now because I understand loss is so scary that people don’t know what to do with the discomfort, so they whistle past the graveyard or they put a one-liner into the silence or they try to smooth it over or they pull theological future hope over present suffering in order to self-soothe. Because when we see that abyss of mortality creeping in, we do everything that we can not to look it in the face. We haven’t been given the education or resources or the comfort or consolation that we need in order to confront, even embrace what is happening.
When you look at all the ancient cultures throughout history, there have been so many, what Caitlin Doughty in her book, From Here to Eternity, fascinating book, she calls it death engagements. Every culture has a way of death engagement. I believe the people of the Toraja tribe, they exhume their dead ancestors every summer and set them up. They’re mummies, and they have tea with them and they eat breakfast with them. If you look at Mexico Día de los Muertos, they have the shrines with their pictures where they honor and celebrate, commemorate their dead. In Korean culture, we have Jesa. Every year, we talk about our patriarchs and matriarchs, their accomplishments. We read a timeline and have almost like a worship or a church service where we talk about them and remember them.
In Western culture, when you look at death, you have horror movies that treat dead bodies like they’re some sort of thing to be horrified of and scared of and to run from. We put bodies six feet underground in a segregated lot, fill the body with chemicals, and sell all their belongings in a garage sale. And we’re told, there’s that Swedish death cleaning thing, “Just get rid of all their stuff.” And maybe these things can be helpful for some people, but I would say that that all contributes to a culture of looking away when it comes to loss and the death.
But when you look at how did ancient cultures do it, they kept their dead close and they honored them. And in that way, as hard as grief is, grief was something that was not meant to be removed like poison, but rather carried as a gift or an honoring that we’re living in memoriam. And so I think there’s such a shame around grief because it seems like, “Oh, you can’t let this grief make you fall apart. You’re getting emotional,” that sort of thing. But now when I cry over my friend John, or when I cry with my patient, that for me, my tears are a way of honoring them, the one person who is uniquely them who is now gone. For someone to tell me, “You got to let them go,” there’s no way. I’m carrying them with me, and they’re going to make me larger.
And to your point, Warwick, just a real quick thing, you’re talking about your father and I want to lift him up and honor him. And I’ve learned so much that grief is missing the past, but it’s also missing a future that we didn’t get to have. All the moments that you wish you could have shared with them. And I think Michelle’s honor in her book, Welcome to H Mart, about the death of her mother, she writes about grief as much as missing the past as it is, missing the future that you wanted with them. The inside jokes, the moments of celebration and sorrow, their advice, those kinds of things. And so I think keeping that person with us is a way of almost continually living with them and living with their ghosts. And it’s their ghosts that can make us more fully alive.

Gary Schneeberger:
It’s important, I think, for folks who are listening and watching because at Beyond the Crucible, we’ve talked a lot about people who’ve passed away and the grief that comes with that, but really, you and I talked before we did this interview, June, so that we could ask intelligent questions, and one of the things you said to me I thought was interesting, and it applies to everybody who’s listening to this, and that is, you said this, “Even losing a dream, losing something intangible, moving to a city, even good change involves grief.” So those steps that you just talked about work for any kind of grief that we’re feeling, not just the intense loss of a loved one, right?

J.S. Park:
Yeah, because I think one of the things that maybe people dismiss are non-death losses or intangible losses. The grief of a dream, for example. I had this whole plan for the future, but then this illness or this injury or this rejection, I wasn’t able to do it, this career, this goal that I had. And some people may say, “Well, you didn’t even get it,” or, “You didn’t even really lose anything.” But that is a type of grief called intrapsychic grief. It’s the pain of losing what can never be.
For some folks who have experienced a miscarriage, my wife and I suffered a miscarriage three years ago, there’s disenfranchised grief in that, there’s ambiguous grief in that, but also intrapsychic grief, losing what will never be. We had a dream about our baby. For some people who had these big dreams and then 2020 came around, the pandemic, they had to put everything on hold and some people never recovered.
And so that intrapsychic grief, the non-death losses, even Gary, like you were saying, quoting back to me, even people who have good change, who move towards the city for a big job, you’re basically saying no to everything else. Even good change involves loss. Maybe some of us have been in this situation where you were working on the floor and suddenly, “Hey, we want you to be a manager. You’re promoted to a manager.” And suddenly all the other floor workers look at you like, “You’re not one of us anymore.” You’re making more money, you’re being a manager, you got the plaque on your desk, but now the floor workers look at you funny. Any kind of good change involves grief because it involves loss, any kind of change.
And so I noticed on a calendar that there’s a National Grief Day or National Day of Mourning, and I tend to think… I chuckled at that because I thought that should be on the calendar every day because we’re constantly grieving. We’re always losing something, even if it’s just time on the clock. And so there’s constant grief. And I think we do need to acknowledge that and grieve that together because part of that grieving, there’s growth in that. There’s coming together to be able to say, “Hey, here’s this dream that I lost and it meant something to me. What can I do now or what can I do to honor that dream?”
One thing that I have the privilege of doing in rooms is when someone is debilitated by illness and injury and it’s now a before and after in their life, sometimes people in the room will say things like, “Well, you just need to reorganize and readjust and we’re going to change our plans and do this and do that and make something new out of this and do everything you can do.” But one thing I’ll pause to do is I’ll say, “Can you tell me about all the things that you wanted to do?” And I’ll ask them to share that dream with me. And as painful as it is, they share that dream with me both smiling and crying because at least in some way by speaking that dream that’s now gone out loud, I get to honor it. And in some way by speaking it, at least it becomes true. At least someone gets to witness what I wanted. And so even that grief ritual, that honoring, is important for us and the things that we lose that may not be real to someone else but are certainly real to us.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah. It’s so profound, June. Sometimes there can be a both, and. There’s a need to move on, but there’s also a need to sit with. And somehow I think what you’re talking about by sitting with, you both honor it but, maybe move on is not the right word, but you’re able to be functional. Because most of us have wives, husbands, kids, grandparents, coworkers, there are people that depend on us that we have to find a way to show up to care for them. And so it’s a both, and. You’ve got to feel your feelings and grieve, but you’ve also got to find a way to both hold that grief, but at the same time be present for others who are counting on you. So again, two opposing concepts, if you will.
And so I think the rituals you’re talking about maybe help you, as I’m listening to it, feel those feelings, grieve the grief, but also find a way to have it in a place where the pain is still there, but it’s still hurting, but you’re also able to care for others and do the things you feel, at least from my perspective, God is calling you to.
And so just back to the intangible grief, which is a great point you brought up, Gary. I know for me, I think of, again, listeners would know this, growing up in this family media business, 150 years old in Australia, founded by a stronger business person for Christ as I’ve ever come across. It’s like, gosh, there was this great vision that he had. I had this vision of restoring when I became a follower of Christ at an evangelical Anglican church at Oxford. Gosh, I know God’s plan. It must be to [inaudible 00:36:46]. The company image of the founder was so obvious to me. It’s dangerous when you feel like you know what God’s plans are.
And so there’s the grieving of, oh, I made some mistakes and that vision is lost, but it’s like, it’s lost, but now I have a different life, a different vision. And so I feel like nothing happens by accident. So if you believe that, from my perspective, then maybe God had His reasons. But yes, there’s a grieving at the loss of that. And I don’t live in Australia anymore where I grew up, and it’s hard to see family and friends there every week. It’s so far. So there’s the grieving of that. But it is, you feel your feelings, it is what it is, but yet I don’t let it demobilize me.
Does any of that… I guess I cover a couple of different points. Does that make sense at all of…

J.S. Park:
Yeah. If I could succinctly put it, I think for me, I got a lot of Megan Divine’s book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK. And she writes, “Rather than moving on, we move with.” How do we move with what we have? And there’s a difference. It sounds like such a small difference, but it makes a world of difference. How do we move into a world now with the loss that we have, but move into it hopefully holding hope and holding vision for something different?

Warwick Fairfax:
See, that’s so good because we talk a lot at Beyond the Crucible about not being in the pit of despair for your whole life, hiding under the cover, saying, “I’m so angry. I’m never doing anything productive with my life,” which, to me, is not helpful psychologically or any other way. You’ve got to find a way, “Okay, this is awful, but I’ve got to find a way to move forward. Maybe this taught me some things. How can I use this for good?” Not that suffering is ever good, but how can I use this to help others? I’ve had so many people on our podcast that have done that, people who’ve been through substance abuse, coming alongside others who have been through substance abuse, saying, “Hey, I know what you’re going through. It’s not just a bumper sticker. I really do.” And just sit with them.
I think in your words, moving with means you’re not abandoning your grief, but neither are you sitting there purely grieving without doing anything productive with the rest of your life. You could have been demobilized by what happened to John and say, “You know what? I’m going to stop being a chaplain. I’m going to stop it. I’m not going to sit with any more patients. I’m in too much pain.” But you made a choice not to do that. You made a choice, “I’m going to grieve, but I’m going to move with and still be available to be with others.”
Does that make sense at all?

J.S. Park:
Yeah. Absolutely. And my heart does go out to people who take the time that they need in order to recuperate, recover, or my heart goes out to people who don’t have the community and resources that can step in for them and who feel paralyzed because they were never given the right consolation.
But what you’re saying reminds me of, I had this very young patient and she lost her baby, her dog, and one of her grandparents in one week. And she couldn’t sleep. And so I was seeing her, I think, on the fourth or fifth day that she had been admitted. I’m changing some details, altering them for her privacy, but she told me essentially, “I lost these three very, very dear loved ones in my life. I can’t sleep.” And then she said, “I started thinking, could I maybe open a nonprofit and start helping the poor and start a fundraiser? When I grow up, I want to be a social worker, and then I want to raise money for dog shelters and for single women who are raising their…”
And she had all these big dreams and she goes, “Is it too much? Do you think it’s too much?” And part of me as a chaplain, I’m supposed to help facilitate and process with her, “Oh, what does that mean for you to have these big dreams?” Or, “What does it mean for you that you’re saying it’s too much?” Just to be more open-ended. But I could see in her face that out of her grief, she wanted the sapling to emerge. She wanted beauty in the midst of her desolation. And I see that with patients who suffered violent injustice, violent loss especially. We’re seeing that now in our country and all over the world, the out of grief emerges a need for justice and solidarity and collective transformation. And so what I told my patient, I just told her, “It’s not too much. I think it’s great.” And she looked at me and she said, “Thank you.” And she went right to sleep.

Warwick Fairfax:
One last thing I want to talk about is you have so many profound things in your writing. And one of the things you say is that we’re called to each other’s wounds to tend to each other’s loss. That’s just… Talk about that because this is… We’ve been talking a lot about our own grief, and obviously you’re a chaplain in which you do this, but for people who aren’t chaplains, just people listening, what does that mean being called to each other’s wounds? Because there’s something profound in that insight that you talk about.

J.S. Park:
Yeah. Earlier, I said that there’s something about loss that is incredibly scary and causes us to self-soothe and to look away, but I can also say that in credit to our humanity, to our innate compassion, to our need to connect, when we see suffering in our most natural and you could say divine and human state, we are called to one another. I actually think that when we look away, we’re forcing ourselves to do that. When we self-soothe, we’ve been trained and indoctrinated to do that. But in our most natural state, the most natural God-designed human condition, when we see someone suffering, we can’t help but be called to them. We can’t help but to feel heartsick and stomach-sick.
There’s a homesickness and then there’s almost a, quote unquote, human sickness. We see someone hurting, we’re called that way. And it takes a lot of narratives and forces of division and bigotry to get us to dehumanize one another. But without all that, if we strip all that narrative away, we see suffering, we are compelled to step in and support, to speak into and act, to alleviate and to liberate.
And so I think sometimes I’ll see at deathbeds, I’ll see people get into fistfights over the dead. I’ll see people arguing about the will. I’ll see someone who’s died, the wife shows up, and then the three mistresses show up. Sometimes I’ll see someone begging for their children to come to bedside, and the children refuse to come because of a history of abuse. So I’ve seen how bad it can get. And in all of these stories, the people who don’t forgive or the people who are angry, I want to validate where they’re at. I want to validate their anger. I want to say that there’s abuse involved, you don’t owe forgiveness, you don’t owe a relationship. I want to understand all these things, and I have so much compassion for all these things.
And I can also say that even in those situations where I see animosity, I see violence, I see grudges, the reason why people are so hurt about this, the reason why that mother says, “Please call my children. Even if they don’t want to see me, just call them,” the reason why I see even people fighting over a will is because in some small way, even beyond their capacity to do it, they want to connect and to be heard and to say, “This hurts.” Or, “I messed up and they need to know that I’m sorry about this.” Even in all of that, that need for the deathbed reconciliation.
So Warwick, I hope I’m answering your question, but that’s what I’ve seen. And as a chaplain, it’s been my honor to support people in it.

Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick indicated that that was a turning point toward the last question. This is the time in the show, June, where I would be remiss if I did not give you the opportunity to tell our listeners and viewers how they can find out more about you, your books, your ministry, all of that.

J.S. Park:
Yeah. I’m on all the things, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Substack. I probably have a Twitter out there somewhere that I haven’t seen in a while. But my book is called As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve. And then I have an upcoming book coming out in November, and the title hasn’t been released yet, but it’s on family dynamics, intergenerational trauma, and reclaiming our motherland. And so a lot of that is on family stuff. And that book was actually harder to write than the book on grief because I got really personal, really dug into my family tree and lineage and all of that. And when they say family’s complicated, I just have to ask, “Oh, you mean a family?” That’s every family. These family dynamics are complicated. I’m like, “Oh, so they’re a family then.” Yeah, so that book’s coming out in November.

Gary Schneeberger:
Warwick, as always, the last question here is your prerogative, so take it away.

Warwick Fairfax:
So June, there might be somebody listening today and they might feel like today is their worst day. They might have lost a loved one. It could be feelings of joy, but very often there could be feelings of anger, and it could be either because they feel it was so unjust this person was taken from them or maybe they’re angry at that, but they’re angry at that person who they had a poor relationship with in life. Anger can be very complicated. So today might be somebody’s worst day. They’re grieving and their emotions are a flood of emotions, some conflicting, like waves hitting against each other. They may not be waves going in one direction. They might be going in 10 directions at once of all sorts of anger wrapped up in grief. What would be a word of hope or at least a word of comfort for somebody in that situation?

J.S. Park:
I can think of several things, but I think the main thing I want to say is you are not lesser for feeling how you feel. Everything that you’re feeling, whether you want to scream at the sky, roll around on the ground, whether you want to shake fists, throw a chair, or you’re sitting in a corner and you’re completely shut down and it’s cognitive fog and you can’t do anything but scroll your phone or you haven’t cried a tear, that amplitude of emotions, however you’re feeling, I hope you’re never ashamed for that. Your emergent response, that immediate response is what your body needs to go through and it is your way of honoring that loss. And I hope no one makes you feel lesser for it.
I have seen all kinds of response to loss. And every time I think I’ve seen them all, I see one more, whether that’s singing or dancing, rocking back and forth, rolling around on the ground, burying their face in their loved one’s hair for two hours, all of it. And so I hope no one tells you anything like, “You shouldn’t do that.” I hope you don’t believe that. That is what you need. Just as everyone grieves differently, we need differently.
And I would say the other thing too is, as hard as this may be, if you’re like me, you may find it hard to ask for help. And I hope that you would be willing to lean on your supports, even if it’s just that one person. And just I hope you know that the people who love you, they will never tell you that you are too much or that you’re being too little. And I really do hope you lean on your supports. I know that that’s a tough thing to reach out to people, and you may feel guilty or you feel bad or, “I just lost someone. I don’t know if I want to burden them with all my stuff, all my sadness. I don’t want to slobber all over them,” but you have people in your life who love you and who have that godly type of love that says, “I love even your slobber. That’s okay.” If you need a shoulder to weep all over, that person’s shoulder is open and ready and willing.
There are so many times in my life where I was ashamed to reach out. Even as having been a patient in the hospital, I was worried about how people would see me being so vulnerable and being in this gown, and I haven’t showered in a day and I’m unkempt and I don’t have my toothbrush and all my stuff. But when I let that door open and I let my family in fully and I let my friends in to see me, I knew I can’t get through this without people. I can’t do this alone, and I wouldn’t want to.
So even if it’s just the one person in your life or it’s a pastor or even if you need to pay for a therapist, it doesn’t make it any lesser even if you pay for that. If there’s support in your life, I hope you lean on them and not feel any shame for it and fully embrace them.

Gary Schneeberger:
Friends, I’ve been in the communications business long enough to know when the last word has been spoken on a subject, and that word spoken by our guest, J.S. Park, was the last word on our conversation today.
Warwick, we’ve just finished our conversation with author J.S. Park, whose actual name, non-book name, is June Park. And boy, it’s good stuff in there. It’s going to be hard for you, but I’m going to challenge you with it anyway. What is one takeaway you’d love for our listeners and viewers to have from this episode?

Warwick Fairfax:
Oh my gosh, it was so wonderful talking to June. I think one of the things we’re often taught about grief is just to suppress it. Move on, buckle up, deal with it, don’t show any tears, which is profoundly unhelpful. I think any psychologist would tell you, “You can’t stop your emotions.” And so one of the things that June says is, “You’ve got to grieve.” You’ve got to sit with those emotions. You’ve got to feel those feelings, and rather than ignore them, you’ve got to find a way to move with that grief to grieve and come alongside other people’s wounds.
And so grief doesn’t necessarily go away. As I was saying in the podcast, I lost my dad in early 1987. Because I was a child of his third marriage, he was in his 80s when he died and I was 26 at the time. So I often think about him, and often very good thoughts. And yes, occasionally there are some things that maybe he could have done differently. I don’t know. We all have a mix of emotions. But I think just allowing ourselves to grieve and to just sit with it.
And one of the things he also talked about in a lot of different cultures, they will have rituals in which people will come together on maybe their birthday or each year and just share memories of that person. And those memories could be good, they may not be good, but just giving yourself the permission to feel those disparate feelings that may be of joy, of anger, or sadness, and just not stuffing those feelings in the basement, as one of our guests said.
I think one of the things that here at Beyond the Crucible, you often talk about both, and. And so what that means in this context is you want to feel those feelings. You want to grieve the loss of a loved one, which could be old age or could be a car accident. It could be all sorts of different feelings that you have. You might have this loving feeling towards them. Maybe they were a parent that was abusive. Maybe those feelings of grief are complex, but you’ve got to feel those feelings, but at the same time, you’ve got to find a way to, I wouldn’t say move on, but to use J.S. Park, June’s words, find a way to move with so that those feelings of grief and anger don’t prevent you from being a loving husband, wife, child, coworker. You might have people that work for you. So you’ve got to find a way to both grieve, but yet be in a place where it doesn’t stop you moving forward.
We say at Beyond the Crucible a lot that your work, it doesn’t define you, but you can’t live in the pit of despair your whole life. You can’t sit under the covers your whole life. You’ve got to find a way to move forward. And for us at Beyond the Crucible, and for many of our guests, those who’ve been abused, for instance, have found a way in some cases to comfort others who’ve been abused. Those who have lost loved ones, maybe you’ve found a way to comfort others who’ve lost loved ones. So make some meaning, some purpose out of tragedy. It’s not always the case, but for many of our guests, it’s often the case.
So I think it’s important to grieve and not stuff those feelings, but it’s also important to find a way to, maybe it’s not move on, but it’s move with. There has to be a beyond the crucible. So you’ve got to find a way to move beyond as you’re moving with. Not an easy thing to do, but it’s important to grieve, but you don’t want that grief to basically control your whole life that you ignore all the people that depend on you and all the people that love you. It’s a both, and. Not a simple thing, but you want to grieve and find a way to move with in getting beyond your crucible, but that grieving doesn’t necessarily go away. And that’s okay. It’s a both, and.

Gary Schneeberger:
Until we’re together the next time, please remember that we know your crucible experiences do indeed cause grief. As June said during the conversation, “Hey, there’s a National Grief Day on the calendar. Shouldn’t it be on every day on the calendar?” We know that the crucibles that you go through in all seriousness are sources of grief. But we also know this, that when you dig in, when you learn the lessons of the crucibles that you’ve experienced, when you give yourself the chance to reflect on those things, we know that it can tee you up to go on another great new adventure. And that new adventure takes you to the greatest destination you can ever get to, and that is a life of significance.
Welcome to a journey of transformation with the Beyond the Crucible Assessment. Unlike any other, this tool is designed to guide you from adversity to achievement. As you answer a few insightful questions, you won’t just find a label like The Helper or The Individualist. Instead, you’ll uncover your unique position in the journey of resilience. This assessment reveals where you stand today, the direction you should aim for, and crucially, the steps to get there. It’s more than an assessment. It’s a roadmap to a life of significance.
Ready? Visit BeyondTheCrucible.com. Take the free assessment and start charting your course to a life of significance today.