As Long as You Need Quotes

“Speeding through grief always has a cost. To bury somebody's supposed-to-be is also to bury a story that's untold. When you bury someone's story like that, it gets lodged in the ribcage, it gets radioactive, it festers, it shouts to be heard. Grief is always a voice that needs to speak. If you suppress it, it still speaks— but not always in ways that are healthy. Not in the ways you need. It pushes through your skin like rogue splinters.
Burying a future loss without telling its story can make you sick. Timesick. You get split between timelines. The further along you go, the further away you get from that dream, and you look around and wonder how people can keep going while you want the world to stop, time to freeze, to get back to your real universe. And you get well-meaning people around you, always the ones who mean well, who are nudging you forward, shoving you, really, and you clutch two timelines until you're ripped in half.
Part of my role as a chaplain, I've learned, is to make room for these original timelines. That they may be spoken, shared. The story told. "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you, Zora Neale Hurston said. It must be conversely true that there is no greater peace than to tell that story.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“What I feared was not that God wasn’t real, but that suffering had no meaning, no significance, no witness. I could live in a godless world. I was unsure I could live in a meaningless one. A world without a god still made sense. Faith would be one less thing for me to hold. But a world without sense was unbearable. It meant nothing was holding me.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“There is no such thing as closure. There is no final stitch, no last loop. We do not move on. We move with.1”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“Grief is the debt we pay to live and to love and to chase the stuff that gives us meaning. Every breath is a debt collection on a collapsing hallway of deficit. You are a life on loan.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“She asks me, "How do you grieve someone you never met?"
With each patient, I hear similar questions. It keeps emerging, this pulse. It presses in every room, leans on every shoulder, demands an answer: How do you grieve future loss? Underneath that, more questions: How do you deal with the viciousness of a broken dream? How do you move on from the picture of life in your head? How do you keep moving through a parallel-universe life?
My patients suffer from good dreams. What I mean is, it's not the nightmares that keep them up. It's the hope. Daydreams of another life. Instead of homesick, they're timesick.
Before becoming a chaplain, I thought grief was about missing the past. About reflecting on all the things before, the stuff we had until mortality crawled through the window. It's true. We grieve the past.
But mostly no one gets a chance to grieve the future. It doesn't seem to read as a real loss.
I need to tell you about this because nobody told me:
The dream that didn't happen is as much of a loss as losing the one that did.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“It wasn't until I sat with patient after patient, from emergency room to deathbed, that I saw what they saw: In their illness or injury, I saw a memory loss of the future. This is called intrapsychic grief, the pain of losing what will never be, the reaching for something that was supposed to happen.
This intrapsychic grief is a specific but universal ache.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve