Inside a Korean hospice, where life begins again

Park Myung-hee, nursing team leader at the hospice and palliative care center at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital in Seocho District, Seoul, speaks during an interview, June 22. Korea Times photo by Yun Gi-hun

By Hankookilbo

• Published Jul 12, 2026 12:10 AM KST

Dying children trade sterile shrouds for pink dresses, favorite toys

After a patient dies in the hospice ward, a middle-aged nurse who cared for her removes the hospital gown. Before the patient is prepared for burial, the nurse dresses her in clothes she chose when she was still alive.

A mother of three sons wore a silk hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, that she had worn only once — at her eldest son’s wedding. A 17-year-old boy, who had spent less than a year in school, wore a crisp high school uniform that still looked new.

Families prepared some clothes specifically for that day. A 5-year-old girl who grew up in the ward wore a pink dress, her favorite color. An 11-month-old baby born with childhood cancer wore a jeogori, a traditional Korean jacket, made for a first birthday party that the hospital held early.

For the nurse, the ritual is not about dressing the dead. It is about restoring the person behind the patient.

Park Myung-hee, 56, is a nurse and team leader at the hospice and palliative care center at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, affiliated with The Catholic University of Korea. During her 31-year career, she has cared for patients in the final stages of cancer and has been present for the final moments of about 10,000 people.

“The families who are left behind will remember for the rest of their lives the last image they saw of the patient,” Park said. “Before putting them in burial clothes, I wanted to show them the image of the person simply as a human being.”

That is why she keeps doing it. In her view, hospice workers care not only for those who are dying, but also for families who must live with the memory of the farewell.

Park rejects the idea that a hospice is simply where people go to die. She sees it as a place where terminally ill patients can live their final days as themselves.

“The battle with illness has ended, so life begins again at last,” she said. “Here, people eat what they want without hesitation. Our nurses and volunteers find it for them by any means.”

They also say what they had postponed. Park said patients speak words they feared they might never get to say, including “I love you,” “Thank you” and “I am sorry.”

“If they do not say them right now, they will regret it the moment they close their eyes,” she said. “It is the process of returning completely to themselves.”

Clothes chosen from life

That conviction took shape slowly. Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital was Park’s first workplace. She joined in 1991 and moved through general and cancer wards before taking charge of hospice work in her fifth year as a nurse.

She does not describe herself as naturally strong. In nursing college, classmates worried about her sensitive nature and told her, half-jokingly, that someone so tenderhearted might not last long as a nurse. She worried too. During hospital training, she trembled before giving injections because she feared missing a vein or hurting a patient.

She wondered whether she belonged in a hospital at all. Then she began treating patients.

“When I actually went to work, I liked the patients so much,” she said. “During the first week after I started work, I felt as if I had received from those people all the gratitude I would ever receive in my life. I was excited.”

The fear eased. Park became the kind of young nurse who stepped forward before anyone asked. She gave diet counseling to a patient preparing for a kidney transplant. For the parents of a child with a rare disease, she searched the hospital library, clipped international case studies and handed them over.

She even rented a room near the hospital so she could run over quickly if the ward called. At the time, she believed effort would make her useful. She also believed that if she tried hard enough, patients would get better.

That belief shattered in the cancer ward. The suffering there felt different from what she had known in general wards. Around that time, she treated a patient she still remembers as the “elderly patient in the red hat.”

“There was a patient who cared for me like a daughter,” Park said. “He was a patient in his 60s who wore a red wool hat because all his hair had fallen out while undergoing chemotherapy.”

“He had seemed to be improving. Then he began vomiting everything he ate. He lost weight quickly.” Watching him move toward death, Park felt that she was tied hand and foot.

“The patient was suffering, and I could do nothing beside him,” she said. “That was the first time I felt helpless.”

After he died, Park became afraid of seeing patients. A senior nurse called her aside and spoke to her quietly.

“You will have no choice but to keep seeing patients who cannot be treated,” the senior nurse told her. “Even so, there is still something we can do for them.”

That something was hospice care.

Park was 26 when she decided to enter hospice work. People around her tried to stop her. They asked why someone so young wanted to carry such a heavy burden. Even among nurses then, she said, a hospice was seen as a place where patients were sent after others had given up on them.

But one sentence stayed with her. “There is still something we can do.”

What nurses can still do

Park remembers her first rounds in the hospice ward clearly. The ward had only 10 beds, and the atmosphere felt less like a hospital unit than a small neighborhood gathering.

Conversations began with questions about pain and symptoms, then shifted to everyday life. What time does your child finish work today? When is your family coming?

The mood differed from cancer wards, where patients often lived on edge after harsh chemotherapy. In the hospice ward, volunteers sang hymns and children’s songs. Park wondered at first whether this was really a hospital.

Before then, she had only sent patients to hospice. She had not come to see what happened after they arrived. Guilt had kept her away, she said, because she felt as if sending a patient there meant giving up.

“In the cancer ward, I had only seen people pass away while writhing in pain,” she said. “But here, patients were leaving with peaceful expressions. I thought, how can it be this different?”

Many patients told her the same thing. “If I had known it was like this here, I would have come sooner.”

Park believes they often came too late, when death was already close and there was little time left to put their affairs in order.

In 1996, when Park joined the ward, hospice care in Korea was in its infancy. The country had few specialists. There were no palliative medicine specialists, so internal medicine doctors took turns seeing patients. Nurses, who cared for patients around the clock, shouldered most of the workload.

“There were not even books translated into Korean, so I struggled to obtain international medical textbooks and study them,” Park said. “No one had experience with how to manage pain in terminal patients when the purpose was not treatment.”

Books helped, but patients taught her lessons the books did not.

One patient had breast cancer and severe lymphedema. Her hands and arms swelled and became hard as a rock. Park had never seen symptoms like that before. Wanting to ease the pain, she massaged the patient’s arms forcefully. At the time, she understood massage as firm pressure with the fingertips.

The patient’s son, then in fourth grade, asked whether he could help. Every day, Park and the boy each took one of the patient’s arms and pressed hard.

Then Park went to Australia for an eight-day training program. Hospice workers there taught her how to manage lymphedema. They told her never to massage strongly because too much pressure can damage lymph cells and worsen swelling. The right method was gentle stroking.

“I wanted to buy a plane ticket and fly back immediately,” Park said. “I felt so sorry that I had cared for the patient in the wrong way.”

By the time Park returned, the patient had died. Park pored over the materials she had brought back from Australia. She organized what she had learned and taught colleagues at her hospital and nurses at other hospice institutions.

Since then, whenever a patient dies under her care, Park writes a clinical reflection. She records the questions that stay with her. What if she had tried something else? Would the outcome have changed?

Over time, those reflections helped form “standard guidelines” for end-of-life care.

Small wishes at life’s end

If the purpose of a hospital is treatment, Park said, the purpose of a hospice is different. It is “to fulfill daily wishes every day,” she said. In practice, that means meeting small wishes before patients run out of time.

For patients nearing death, small things become urgent. If someone says they want a fried egg, nurses call volunteers and ask for one immediately. If someone wants bright nail polish, a volunteer who runs a nail art shop comes to the ward.

Hospice workers, Park said, try to prevent one kind of regret. They do not want patients leaving the world thinking, “Ah, I should have tried that.”

One child began treatment for leukemia at around age 2 and spent nearly all her life in the hospital until she turned 5. She had few childhood memories outside the ward. Her first wish was to eat a whipped cream cake, something she had never tasted. The nurses went to a well-known bakery near the hospital to buy one for her. They filmed the child happily eating the cake with whipped cream smeared all over her hands, and her mother watched the video over and over afterward.

Her second wish was to meet Lightning Man, the superhero character from the popular Korean children's television program "Ding Dong Dang Kindergarten." The entire nursing team worked together to secure tickets for the "Lightning Man" musical. But on the day of the performance, the child's fever suddenly spiked, making it impossible for her to attend. The disappointment was especially heartbreaking because no one knew whether there would be another chance.

So the medical team decided to become "Lightning Man" themselves. The nurses bought a costume online, and the attending physician surprised the child by wearing it during hospital rounds.

For the child's parents, worn down by years of caregiving, the wish list became a way to prepare for goodbye. Park believes that perhaps because the child ate what she wanted and did what she wanted, she remained with her parents five months longer than expected.

The child later drew a picture in art therapy. In it, she rode a train to heaven with her mother and father. Park told her she would have to go to heaven alone because her parents had to stay behind. The child became sad.

"I asked what she would like to ride if not a train. She said she might be OK without her parents if she could go while holding a big pink flamingo," Park said

Park ran to Apgujeong-dong, searched toy stores and found one. Park thought the doll might make death feel a little less frightening for the child.

After the child died, she left the ward holding the flamingo doll and wearing the pink dress in her favorite color.

When caregiver becomes patient

Park's understanding of a life left unfinished changed 26 years ago, when she was 30 and lay inside a cold coffin as part of a mock funeral program.

When the lid closed and the sound of nails being hammered rang out, she did not feel fear. She felt resentment.

Only after the program ended did Park realize how little she had understood patients’ feelings. She had thought she was empathizing with them. Instead, she said, she had carried an arrogance she had not seen in herself.

“How many reasons must there have been why they could not die yet?” she said. “How unfair it must have felt for them.”

When she returned to the ward, the patients’ words hit home differently. "It's now or never."

Looking back 26 years later, Park said she has achieved at least one thing.

“At the moment I die, I do not think I will at least have the resentment that ‘there are still so many things I have not been able to do as a nurse,’” she said.

There were moments when she wanted to stop. She said she endured because patients were still dying in pain, and each time, she recalled the senior nurse’s words that there are things still to be done.

Park has four years left before retirement. As she prepares slowly to leave the ward, she worries about the patients who still cannot enter. About 50 people are waiting for hospice admission.

Korea’s inpatient hospice care remains limited. Inpatient hospice facilities in Korea accept only patients with terminal cancer, leaving out patients with heart or vascular diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of available beds fell, and many of those beds remain concentrated in the Seoul metropolitan area.

Patients outside the capital region struggle to come even when they want to. Korea offers hospice care in inpatient, home-based and consultative forms, but Park’s concern is the shortage of beds for those who need inpatient care.

“I hope more people will be given the opportunity to end their lives with dignity at a low cost,” Park said.

Five years ago, Park began battling cancer herself. She took barely more than a month off work. Becoming a patient changed what she understood about pain.

“Now that I have become a patient myself, one good thing is that I understand my patients' feelings better,” she said. “So this is what the pain of a cancer patient is. Only now have I come to know it properly.”

At the end of the interview, Park was asked what scene from her life might come to mind in her own final moment.

She has not married and has no children, she said, but her years as a nurse bring happy memories. If she is lucky enough to have time to prepare for death, she believes one image will return.

“What will come to mind at the end will probably be the faces of the patients I have cared for until now,” she said.

Park has spent her life seeing patients off. She believes that one day, the faces she once sent on their final journey will come back to see her off on hers.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.