In November 2015, a widower walked around Charlotte passing out love notes in honor of his late wife. Within a few days,Hyong Yi’s story went around the world. Here’s how his life has changed since then.
After Hyong Yi’s wife died at age 41 in November 2014, he wanted to stay in bed and hide from the world. Motivated by Catherine’s public fight against ovarian cancer, Yi instead catalogued his grief, sharing in Facebook posts the suffering he went through. As the one-year anniversary of her death approached in November 2015, he wanted to pay tribute to her.
He wrote 100 love notes that chronicled their courtship, marriage, and struggles as she succumbed to ovarian cancer. On a brisk Friday before Thanksgiving last year, starting at the corner of Trade and Tryon streets, he walked around uptown giving those love notes away to strangers. His and Catherine’s two children, Anna, then 10, and Alex, then seven, helped.
The notes, which Yi posted at 100lovenotes.com, were simple and profound, funny and mysterious, full of universal truths and inside jokes. He told everyone he encountered—or at least everyone who stopped long enough to listen to him—not to take the love in their lives for granted.
He called the project #100lovenotes, and the story about it that ran in The Charlotte Observer went viral immediately. Photos of Yi, love notes in hand, arms stretched toward passersby in uptown, were published by news organizations all over the world. Yi, an assistant city manager in Charlotte, lost track of all the languages his story was translated into. He ran some stories through translation software and laughed at the gibberish that came out. Love is the international language, indeed.
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