As Long as you Need: Permission to Grieve (Part 1)
Book Review (J.S. Park)
This book is a gift. And it comes at a price. It cost Park to write it. It cost the people whose stories he tells, unfathomable pain. And it will take its toll on you just to read it. It's blessing and gift and it won't let you go without a price.
It's perhaps not a book for everyone, though I think there are lessons in here that everyone ought to heed. It's certainly not a book for every season. Every chapter comes with a content warning.
J.S. Park is a chaplain at a major hospital in the US, and this is a book about suffering and loss and grief like no other. I think most of us suffer some average amount, some more some less. But when you take all the extremes, all the news articles of tragic deaths, all the statistics of medical emergencies, and you're the person exposed to them day and day after day, you become an outlier, a witness to the uncountable trauma of human suffering. And that's the genesis for this book.
I think this book also demonstrates a fact about the importance of reading. We humans have fairly limited time and experience, and we learn so much through our experiences of the world. But how do we learn, e.g., the lessons that it takes a decade of working as a hospital chaplain face to face with traumatic death experiences to learn? Either we go through the same, or we learn from those that have. The gift of reading, or of listening, to other humans and their life experiences, means that in my short lifetime I can learn something of what it's like for countless other humans, from the present and the past, and what they've gone through. They have paid the price of wisdom, often at great cost, and for me the price is simply reading.
So, what's this book? I propose to give you some reading notes in two parts, to try to cover it in some depth. But it is a phenomenal book, so you should probably read it yourself some time. But even if you don't, here's my 2c.
The book falls into four parts, two chapters each. So that makes it easy to split up for us.
Losing Spirit
1: Loss of future dreams
What I see most in the hospital is not just death and dying, but the death of dreams. (p.4)
The opening chapter reflects on this - grief as the loss of possible futures. We think about grief mostly as lost pasts, but it's the lost futures that we also grieve, even if no one tells us about it. And the sliding-doors moments that make this so hard - if only I'd stepped through the doors 3 seconds earlier, or 3 seconds later, what would life have been like? We lose our imagined futures, our 'supposed-to-bes'
It's in this context that Park explores the idea that 'letting go' of grief makes you heal faster, as a lie. The plastering over of platitudes, our desire for other people to 'just get over it' so we can all go back to 'normal'; as if grief were the problem and not the irrevocable loss that caused it.
How do we keep alive the memory of what was lost without denying the reality of that loss? (p.22)
By giving it voice. Because when we silence it, it finds a way to speak anyway.
2: Loss of faith
One of the reasons Park's book is so powerful is that he writes with great poetic effect. Another is the raw honesty. In this chapter Park talks about the toll his first year in the chaplaincy program took on him. The way it dismantled his faith, before it had to be put back together again.
The molecules of my old beliefs, held by shoddy theological forces, were being riven by continual horror at the hospital. The more I saw, the more my faith melted like a wax thread over fire. (p.33)
What had to go first of all is what Park calls 'Pocket Theology' - all the neat, tidy-in-a-row pat answers and straightforward solutions that cross all the Ts and dot all the Is.
For Park, it's the unbearableness of what we have to bear that continually wears him down. How do you cope with seeing suffering after suffering, and wondering whether God can be trusted to be good when he seems to do so little? In one sense, I think this is a litmus test for all theologies - how does your theology stack up against not just the armchair abstract idea of evil and suffering, but the lived unbearable reality of it. Whether that's the killing and dying of the war fields, or the trenches of the hospital. Faith needs disassembly before reassembly.
Losing Mind
3: Loss of Mental Health
When a mind suffers inside, every heart around it suffers with them too. p54
I will always advocate for this: to stay. Stay for the afflicted. Stay and be. No one ought to run at the first sign of trouble. It is human to intervene and to reach hands in for the wounded. I believe deeply, always, in staying. It is my life’s work. More than that, it is the work of life. But what I hadn’t been told is that there is a romanticized, overwrought version of staying. The version in which we believe that giving over everything will rescue or cure or save. p.55
What you don't get from my soundbites and summaries is the deeply human stories. This chapter unflinchingly talks about Park's own depression, and his wife's post-partum depression and suicidal ideations. That, and woven through every chapter are the stories of countless patients, breaking your heart over and over.
There's a lesson in this chapter, and it's short. It's simply this - you couldn't have done more. You did what you could for them, and that's what you did. And it was enough, even if it wasn't enough. It's what you had to give.
4: Loss of worth
I told you how every chapter comes with a content warning. You need it. This one deals with abuse, and the grief of stolen worth. I don't know that anything I write here could do this chapter justice, but if in chapter 2 above I spoke of the need for our theology to come face to face with unrelenting suffering, I think theologies need to come to terms with the monstrous evils that live inside of us. The cheap versions of forgiveness and let it go won't do. You ought to wail and rage against the darkness of human sin. And grace still has a place in all that too. To see the other as human, and to choose to act in a way that you don't become a monster too.
I said at the start it was a book that comes with a price. Honestly, I'm exhausted just re-reading and writing this review. If you made it this far, cut yourself some slack and go and take a break.