Jeannette (Jung Wha) Park

1 March 1933–4 June 2025

1 March 1933–4 June 2025.

My mom died last week. She died the way she wanted — in her apartment, in her favorite chair, with me beside her, looking at her beloved panoramic Long Island Sound view.

When people die, do they know how they will be remembered, in obituaries and funerals? Letting my mom know was important to me, so ten years ago I wrote her what I consider a “pre-obituary.” https://achangnyc.medium.com/tribute-for-thanksgiving-f48bc66e7264

“I want to share the story of my mother, Jeannette Park, a pioneer and exemplar for Korean women, a self-exile who came to the U.S. to become a physician, who made and remade fortunes, and who raised three children while battling my father, a domestic terrorist.”

The pre-obituary was my gift to her — the chance to know how her story would be told, to understand that her sacrifices were seen and honored, that the complexity of her choices would be remembered with respect rather than judgment. She got to see herself as I saw her: deeply flawed, but extraordinary.

That story, drawn from her memory and mine, originally published in 2015, captures the arc of her extraordinary life: born during Japanese occupation to a father who claimed Korean royal lineage, graduated in the second class of women from Ewha medical school in Korea, migrated to America during the era of Asian exclusion, survived Jim Crow segregation and Ohio racism, endured decades of domestic violence while secretly orchestrating her children’s escape through academic achievement while attaining her medical licensure, divorced her abuser, rebuilt her fortunes by sleeping on examination tables and eating one McDonald’s meal a day until she bootstrapped the largest family practice in New London County.

History isn’t just a collection of facts. It’s a story whose facts are determined by the storyteller. You decide what to include. What to omit. And the word I chose to omit in this pre-obituary: Love.

I believe humans crave unconditional love, not trades for the promise of love. I learned that promises were conditional, to be continuously retraded for ever higher hurdles. But that love and conditional love can also coexist. That’s for another story.

Donations in my mother’s memory can be made to Ascent Music at Western Reserve Academy.