(Letter from the parsonage, Those Who Remained in the City, Story Thirteen, 1994)

© WanHee Yoon

The name “Soviet Union” vanished forever from this earth. The leader he once trusted and admired fell from power, and a new one took his place. News from afar declared that a new world had opened.

From across the earth, through the crackle of a satellite phone, his wife’s voice reached him—assuring him that he was still alive.

“The world is changing so fast! Lenin’s statues are being pulled down, and the salary you earn in space for an entire month is now worth no more than four sausages!”

And he thought:

“Who am I in this history? Can I ever return to earth? The one thing I can be certain of is my wife’s and child’s unchanging love for me… Even though everything else shifts and vanishes, surely my family remains. Politics, ideology, the value of money, even the dreams of space—how fleeting they all seem! Once more, I realize that only love is truly precious.”

This was a fragment from the diary of Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who spent 313 days aboard a spacecraft fulfilling his mission. In 1991, while orbiting the earth 5,000 times, he witnessed from afar the fall of Gorbachev, the election of President Boris Yeltsin, and the opening of a new chapter in his homeland’s history.

As he engraved the truth—“Only love matters to humanity”—deep into his heart, sitting in his lonely capsule with tears of longing and isolation, we too sense his humanity. Where is love truly found? As Sergei confessed, the source of love is surely the family. The love shared between husband and wife, between parents and children, is the seed of mature human relationships. It is from this place that I want to share a glimpse of life with my children.

One Christmas, my daughter gave me a deeply moving gift. Handing it to me, she said with a comforting smile:

“Mom, even though it’s late, it’s better than never! Here’s the doll you always wanted as a child…”

It was a doll with wide eyes and long yellow hair.

Not long before Christmas, we had hosted a small evening party for homeless women, both Black and White. Though late at night, our church members and my children joined in. I shared a brief testimony that night, recalling God’s grace in my own poverty and cold as a child.

Like every little girl of that time, I had longed for a doll with golden hair—but my family’s poverty meant I never had one. Instead, I drew dolls on paper, cut them out with scissors, and dressed them with paper clothes. My hands and feet, swollen and red with frostbite, often kept me awake at night. On freezing winter days, hungry and desperate, I would pry open the water jar to drink—only to find it filled with sharp, solid ice. I still remember breaking off chunks, putting them in my mouth, and shuddering as the cold pierced to my core. My father lay bedridden, suffering from tuberculosis and heart disease. To my young eyes, the world looked only dark, cold, and hopeless. Yet Christ’s light entered that despair, pulling me through.

As I told this story, my daughters’ faces flushed and their eyes filled with tears.

Since then, they have often surprised me with gifts—on birthdays, Mother’s Day, or when returning from trips: a white bear doll in an apron, balloons, flowers—tokens of what I once lacked. And astonishingly, each time I receive them, I feel a deep healing in the hidden child within me. The “inner child” who once bore wounds is comforted.

When they were younger, I would sometimes exclaim more than they did at the sight of dolls in a toy store. Yet I could never bring myself to buy one for myself. Now, when they give me dolls, they climb onto my bed to play together, and I—returning to childhood—comb the doll’s hair, change its dresses, and share the stories I never could with my childhood friends.

But children cannot remain in their parents’ arms forever. Like hatchlings stumbling and flapping their wings, they test their possibilities and widen their circles of life.

One day, my younger child spoke firmly:

“Mom, I’ll walk home from school today, so please don’t come pick me up.”

“What? But you’ll have to cross the busy road—it could be dangerous!”

“I’m grown up now! I can cross the street by myself.”

At just nine years old, my child’s insistence left me unsettled. And yet, as I recalled the “Do Not Disturb” signs posted on their bedroom doors, I realized: they are slowly, invisibly slipping from my embrace.

Still, as a mother, I sometimes shadowed them from afar when they insisted on independence—torn between fear and the realization that I must let go.

I even tried to command:

“When you go to college, don’t think of moving far away! And absolutely no boyfriends or girlfriends until you graduate!”

But even as I spoke, I knew I couldn’t hold them forever. My children are not mine to possess. They are, like fledglings, meant to leave the nest.

The empty nests on branches outside remind me: the nest matters only while there are eggs. Once the chicks are hatched, they must risk the ground, the air, even broken wings—until they finally fly.

No matter how warm a mother’s heart may be, the wide, blue, boundless sky awaits them.

They must fly—higher, farther, stronger—into worlds I myself could never reach.

So I must let go. My children will one day shout their “complete independence” and step into their vast future. Until then, my task is simple: to love them, and only to love them. For one day my generation will pass, and I will return to eternity before them.

I do not know if Sergei Krikalev believes in God. But as a hero of the greatest human science, the truth he discovered is timeless: only love reveals the true worth of humanity.

So I fold my hands in prayer to the God who gave us families and children, even as I remember how I too, like my own children now, once struggled to leave His embrace.