Hannah Yoo isn’t sure her father went to heaven. She scorns God for that uncertainty — if there is a God. She’s not even sure about that anymore.
But because her Christian upbringing reinforced forgiveness every Easter, Yoo, 28, has been able to absolve his killers. She sought support from death penalty opponents Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation and soon became a spokeswoman.
“It came naturally to me,” said Yoo, a tax attorney who now lives in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. “Christ died for our sins. The whole thing about Easter is he paid the price so we could be forgiven for everything. … If I hadn’t embraced that doctrine and embraced that truth, I don’t think I would have been able to forgive the murderer as easily as I have.”
But Yoo can’t forgive God for taking her father, Kenneth — the one family member who, as far as she knows, had not accepted Christ as his savior. In Seoul, South Korea, on family business, Yoo’s father was stabbed in the neck, chest and back in the parking lot at Olympic Stadium in May 2005.
“I don’t know where his soul will be,” Hannah Yoo said. “My last conversation with him about his salvation didn’t give me any assurance.”
Since her father’s murder, Yoo’s faith has not been the same, she said.
“I haven’t been able to go to church or listen or sing the praise songs without breaking down,” Yoo said. “I read the Bible every day when I was a child. I don’t know how I went from there to having so much doubt.”
Though Yoo can’t shake her doubts about God and other people, the one thing she does not question is the value of sacrifice — both for strangers and those she loves.
“The characteristic I respect the most is being able to sacrifice and give and not expect anything in return,” she said. “On Easter, God didn’t have to do that, but it’s a beautiful story of how he loved us so much that he gave the ultimate sacrifice — his only son. … I grew up with that and always aspired to be like that. I’ve held on to that.”
As Yoo goes through the sacred motions of Easter this year with her mother at a church in Mount Prospect, she will continue to mourn her father. But she will celebrate the legal victory of life over death, in the form of Illinois’ decision to ban the death penalty.
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