NAPLES, Fla. – On the flight down to South Florida last week, Jane Park looked over at her 3-year-old daughter Grace sitting independently in her adaptive seating device and wiped away happy tears. The idea of Grace sitting on her own on an airplane once seemed impossible.
Park, 36, said she lives each day now as if she’s trying to stretch the last few moments of daylight out of an evening nine. Instead of playing a couple extra holes, she’s stretching out the snuggles for an extra 15 minutes before putting Grace to bed.
Park flew with her family down to Naples, Florida, to receive this year’s Heather Farr Perseverance Award at the CME Group Tour Championship. An LPGA official told her it was a unanimous vote.
Nearly two and a half years ago, after missing the cut at the Volunteers of America Classic in Texas, Park and her family found themselves living out a nightmare in a Dallas hospital as a litany of seizures and brain swelling attacked their once-healthy 10-month-old, leaving her permanently disabled.
Park’s 15-year career on the LPGA ended overnight. She became a full-time caretaker and advocate for Grace, who was diagnosed with refractory epilepsy, which means that medicine can’t stop her seizures.
Park climbed into the grandstand behind the ninth green at Tiburon Golf Club to talk about her journey while her sister-in-law looked after Grace near the bottom of the stairs.
“I think this type of trauma just changes your DNA,” she said, “really changes who you are as a person, how you view things in life. But I think the biggest thing I have received from this whole experience … as cliché as it sounds, I really do not take a single day for granted with her.”
Around a dozen years ago, Park met caddie Pete Godfrey at one of Cristie Kerr’s charity pro-ams. The couple wed five years ago. Like any parent who travels for work, Godfrey misses his kid like crazy when he’s gone. He currently caddies for Hye-Jin Choi, a promising young player from South Korea.
Godfrey’s sister, Helen, quit her job in the U.K. to come help the family and what started out as a six-month assist will more than likely be up to 18 months by the time she goes home. Park’s aunts rotate in and out like angels from above. LPGA friends sometimes drop by unannounced to their Georgia home to shower them with love.
The Saving Grace charity event in New Jersey, organized by LPGA player Marina Alex and Golf4Her founder and CEO Christina Thompson, raises funds to help offset the costs of what’s needed to care for Grace. Last year, Anne van Dam raised money by racing in a half Ironman. A GoFundMe page, set up shortly after Grace fell ill raised more than $120,000.
“Our LPGA family and friends dug into the trenches with us and quite literally lifted our family out of the mud,” Park said in her acceptance speech last Thursday at the Rolex LPGA Awards. “Somehow, while we were dead in our despair, we started to breathe again. You guys gave me the tools to not end my life, when I felt like life had ended.”
There was a time early on after Grace’s injury when the drugs were so sedative that she didn’t show any sign of emotion for 73 days. Her eyes were tied to the right because the injury was on the right side of her brain, and she couldn’t move them.
The spot in the kitchen where baby bottles once sat was filled with syringes. Park left her golf career back in Texas and came home a nurse.
All she wanted was to see her baby smile again. The darkness was overwhelming.
“It was haunting to watch your kid go from a vibrant 10-month-old to like, can’t move, can’t speak, can’t have any type of emotion on her face,” recalled Park.
“And then she let out a smile, like a very, very small smile. I caught it on camera, and I just went upstairs and cried my eyes out.”
As Park celebrated the joy of that moment, she also mourned all that was lost. She has learned how to move through life this way, absorbing grief that cuts like a knife while still appreciating the beauty that remains.
There was a time earlier this year when brain surgery seemed like a possible option for Grace. If most of her seizures were coming from one part of the brain, doctors could consider removing that part. Unfortunately, Grace’s seizures come from all over. Park called it a global infestation of epilepsy. On a bad day, Grace can seize 30 to 35 times, and her injuries are constantly evolving. There’s still a lot doctors don’t know about epilepsy and the brain, the family has learned.
“Holding your kid while they’re seizing, it never gets easier,” said Park,” but I think our capacity for holding grief gets a lot bigger.”
Over the summer, Park teed it up in what might be her final LPGA event alongside an old friend, Paula Creamer. Folks drove from far and wide to meet Park, Pete and Grace at the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational in Midland, Michigan. Park’s raw and moving social media posts have created a community of support that extends beyond the golf world. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to come say hello and burst into tears.
“Just to see the type of impact that Grace has had on the general public,” said Park during tournament week, “and just to see that our story has touched them in a way that has left an indelible mark on them, that’s an honor.”
LPGA winner Megan Khang, 26, can hardly get a word out about Park without getting emotional. Khang is one of the players who likes to surprise Park with her visits.
“Jane and I have this ongoing joke that she’s my future self and I’m her younger self,” said Khang. “She truly inspires me.”
The Dow provided much-needed closure for a woman who won the 2004 U.S. Women’s Amateur and joined the LPGA in 2007. Playing alongside Creamer, with her husband on her bag and Grace outside the ropes, filled her cup.
Tiffany Joh first met Park on a practice putting green when they were both 13. Joh, who left the tour to coach college golf, introduced her best friend via video at the Rolex Awards, noting that their friendship was built on putting contests, hip-hop and bottomless breadsticks at Olive Garden.
There was a time, Godfrey said, when his wife worried that she might be forgotten. That her abrupt departure from the tour would bring an end not only to the career she has loved for so long, but to many of the relationships.
That didn’t happen.
As Park noted in her acceptance speech, the roots of the friendships that began, in some cases decades ago, remain strong. She credits them for lighting the way out of the dark.
“Life still holds so much goodness,” Park said in her closing remarks. “Caring for a disabled child is absurdly hard and profoundly sweet. My grief still to this day remains tremendous, but my love is bigger because our little girl continues to shine, unimpeachably.”
