As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

by J. S. Park Narrated by J. S. Park

Overview

Read by the author.

"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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/26/2024

Park (The Voices We Carry) extends a heartfelt invitation for grieving readers to refrain from “sprinting to closure” and instead mourn on their own timelines. Drawing on his experience as a hospital chaplain, he outlines four types of loss—physical, spiritual, mental, and relational—and the challenges of each, such as losing bodily autonomy (the inability to move or eat on one’s own, for example) or the curtailing of dreams, as experienced by a mother with stillborn triplets who, in a particularly harrowing anecdote, asked the author to narrate what their futures might have been. According to Park, grief is “not something you get over, but something you carry everywhere you go.” Though there’s plenty of gentle advice—construct a healthy support system, grieve in community—readers will welcome Park’s willingness to raise as many questions as he answers, whether he’s describing his patients’ challenges or his own, including how his faith disintegrated early on in his chaplaincy, when he often felt that “prayers are radio waves but God has no antenna, no receiver, no face.” It’s an excellent resource for those working their way through loss. (Apr.)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159307972
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	960,303

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