As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

"A heartfelt invitation for grieving readers...An excellent resource for those working their way through loss." —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Veteran hospital chaplain to the sick, dying, and bereaved, J.S. Park offers you both the permission and the process for how to grieve and heal at your own pace.

In As Long As You Need, J.S. offers an honest and unrushed engagement with grief, decoding four types of grieving—spiritual, mental, physical, and relational—and offering compassionate self-care and soul-care along the way.

If you are struggling to process loss, pain, or grief from the last few years or the last few minutes, J.S. is an experienced and deeply empathetic listener and grief catcher who has held the pain and questions of thousands of patients. While social and cultural narratives about grief are dominated by "letting go, moving on, or turning the page" in his nearly decade of service as a chaplain at a major hospital with a designated level one trauma center J.S. understands firsthand how rushing or suppressing grief only adds a suffocating layer of pain on top of the original wound.

From his unique window into the stories of the ill, injured, dying, and their families, J.S. offers you:

• Permission to dismantle all too common myths about grief and replace them with a guilt-free and unrushed approach to navigating your losses.
• Encouragement for how entering grief, rather than avoiding it, leads to a hard but meaningful holding of your loss.
• Empathy and hope if you are struggling with a crisis of faith in the midst of grief.
• Recognition that grief spans a wide narrative of loss: loss of future, faith, mental health, worth, autonomy, connection, and loved ones.
• Affirmation that your grief is your own. While the DNA of grief might be universal to the human condition, how you experience and process grief is unique to you.

From the ER to deliveries to deathbeds across every sort of illness and injury imaginable, J.S. Park has provided meaningful counseling for people in all walks of life and death. Now, through his book he wants to assure you that, while everybody else might rush past your pain, grief is the voice that says, take as long as you need.

J.S. Park is a hospital chaplain, author, and online educator. For eight years he has been an interfaith chaplain at a 1000-plus bed hospital that is designated a Level 1 Trauma Center. His role includes grief counseling, attending every death, every trauma and Code Blue, staff care, and supporting end-of-life care. He also served for three years as a chaplain at one of the largest nonprofit charities for the homeless on the east coast.

J.S. has a MDiv completed in 2010 and a BA in Psychology. He also has a sixth-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. J.S. currently lives in Tampa, Florida with his wife, a nurse practitioner, and his three-year-old daughter and their adopted dog.