He Sits With People As They Die. This Is His Biggest Lesson.

One of the biggest lessons Joon "J.S." Park has learned about living... has come from those who are dying.

He can still remember a patient he knew who was experiencing chronic pain and went into cardiac arrest. Against her written wishes, her family demanded resuscitation, and when she woke up, the patient was enraged.

"She had believed she was meant to die as relief from her pain, but then returned to a family that 'only wanted me alive to say I was alive,'" Park, 42, tells Scary Mommy. "She had two griefs — her constant suffering in physical pain, and a family that not only did not understand her, but went against her wishes in a misguided belief that being painfully alive was better than peacefully at rest."

In his role as a hospital chaplain, Park — who has amassed an Instagram following of more than 100,000 helping others to unpack the grief that surrounds loss — spends most of his days with those who are critically ill or dying. In his experience, he says patients who are still able to communicate share one common view.

"Many of us, due to lack of resources and enduring in survival mode, do not always get to pursue the dreams we wanted to," Park, also the author of the best-selling book As Long As You Need, explains. "Yet there are many choices we were able to say yes to that we didn't because we were convinced it was too hard, too far, too much. Many of my patients who are critically ill or dying will often express a similar sentiment: I was following everyone else's vision for my life, but I wish I had followed my own."

He adds, "We entrust this very limited and fragile lifespan to the will of others — and maybe their whims were well-intentioned — but it was still theirs and not ours."

Park says hearing this over and over for almost a decade has taught him an invaluable lesson.

"In the end, the worldview that matters is not what we have to prove, but what carries us through," he says. "Much of our inherited worldviews contain a type of progress bar that indicates if we are 'measuring up' to each level. This is true for nearly every religion, but it can also be hustle-and-grind culture, performing arts, politics, parenting, the HOA, or online clout."

But at deathbeds, Park emphasizes, none of these metrics matter.

"Neither better behavior nor 10 steps to success is very relevant for any of my patients and their suffering," he says. "Much of online discourse becomes trivial, what we see political leaders bickering over is mostly superfluous, what is called successful can seem dim and distant."

Because of this, Park says he never enters a room trying to impose more demands or burdens, but instead to create a non-anxious, non-judgemental, comforting presence. It's always his hope to be able to validate what someone may or may not be feeling.

"They can grieve what they didn't get to be and celebrate what they did," he says. "It may seem small, and we are strangers, but our (human) need to be seen is so deep that it matters if the chaplain is really listening. Every one of us will die with regrets — it matters that we get to share them and that we get to tell the story that never was."