”Hopelessness can be contagious. But hope can be, too, and there is no medicine to match it. Chika’s believing in us helped us believe in ourselves.”
In the late 90s, a friend gave me a copy of Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays With Morrie,” and when I saw that he had another new memoir coming out, I knew I wanted to read this one, and put my name on the list at my library.
The lessons he learned with Morrie, an old professor, are very different from the ones he learns from Chika, a young girl whose life is marked with difficulty even before her birth, which was three days before the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and what years she spent with her mother before her mother’s death in childbirth were marked by desperate poverty. A young girl that is brought to an orphanage when her mother dies giving birth to her baby brother, where Albom meets Chika on one of his regular trips to Haiti at the orphanage he runs there – The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage in Port Au Prince.
When it is brought to his attention that Chika needs medical attention that isn’t available in Haiti, he brings her to their home, hoping to find a cure for this girl that has stolen his heart.
”Chika died last spring, when the trees in our yard were beginning to bud, as they are budding now, as it is spring again. Her absence left us without breath, or sleep, or appetite, and my wife and I stared straight ahead for long stretches until someone spoke to snap us out of it.”
Eventually, life begins to return to a more somber ‘normal’ for Albom and his wife. Life has to go on, as do the living. The slow process of grief can’t be rushed along. As husband and wife, with many of their memories of life with Chika intertwined, grief is a shared, but also a solitary process. In his grief, eventually, Chika begins to appear to Albom, moments of conversations urging him through the process, urging him to share his story. Their story. Sharing the lessons that she taught him.
”"I remember times you and I were walking and, without prompting, you reached out and took my hand, your little fingers sliding into mine. I would like to tell you how that felt, but it is too big for words"
This is his story, their story, of the years they spent together, acknowledging the gift that those years were, for she will forever occupy a place in their hearts. And, yes, it has heartbreaking moments, but it also is heartwarming, tender and inspiring. We live, we love, and in the end, we become Real.
“ Real isn’t how you are made …It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”
-- The Velveteen Rabbit by Susan Gabriel
Many thanks, once again, to the Public Library system, and the many Librarians that manage, organize and keep it running, for the loan of this book!