Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World

by Christina Rickardsson

Missing someone doesn’t have anything to do with how long it’s been since you last saw each other, or the number of hours that have passed since you last spoke. It’s about specific moments when you wish they were there by your side.

Because there’s a big difference between choosing not to take care of your children and living in a society that doesn’t give its citizens resources

so you can take care of them.

Despite all the poverty and depravation, my mother had the will and the gumption to give me love.

My home is where I’m happy, where I feel safe, where my friends and family are. My home is where I work and where I feel at home.

The tears of the powerless are not tears of frustration. They’re not tears that gush or tears that burn. The tears of the powerless are silent and resigned.

It was always awful to see someone in the slums who’d become a ghost, who was no longer responsive, who didn’t feel anything, who merely existed but didn’t really live.

People say that the strongest survive, but I wonder if it isn’t the most desperate.

people, especially grown-ups, weren’t interested in the truth but rather in a truth that suited them. They only wanted to know about things that made stuff easier for them. It didn’t matter that I was walling off parts of myself, that I was turning into someone else, a worse person. It wasn’t important to them whether I was happy, or whether I cried myself to sleep each night. No one saw it. For the first time in my life, I started to question why I existed, why I should even care about existing.

Over the years, I’ve had people tell me that I should feel grateful for getting a chance at a better life, and it has really irritated me. We humans have a strong tendency to universalize our own opinions, thoughts, and feelings and assume they apply to other people. No one

but me knows what I feel and what I’ve been through. And it’s really not up to anyone else to say what I should and shouldn’t feel.

years, I realize that my life really hasn’t been about finding myself, but about creating myself.

God had abandoned me, so why shouldn’t I abandon God? I woke up the next morning feeling like something had snapped inside me. I was broken. I thought I’d already felt everything a person could feel, but apparently it could get worse. Luckily, I didn’t know then that emotionally, things were only going to get tougher.

As an adult, when I look back on this incident, I understand that I was suffering a panic attack. It was intense, because it lasted awhile, and I was in extraordinary pain, both physically and mentally. I’ve often wondered why I didn’t call out to my new parents. After all, they had been very nice. I think it was a combination of factors. I didn’t want to disappoint them. They had given me and my brother so much, and it would be very unappreciative of me. Also, if I let

them help me, it would mean that I’d let them into my life, and I was not ready to do that. But most of all, I think that my pride wouldn’t allow me to do it. I was tough, and I could handle things on my own. I was too proud to ask for help, a weakness that has followed

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What I didn’t know then was that when you try to hold on to the past as hard as I was, you sometimes miss out on living in the present. I wish that someone had told me, Christina, live in the moment and dream of the future. That doesn’t mean you lose yourself. But stopping where you are now will cost you more than you can imagine.

Their behavior was so different from the girls’. They said what they thought and what they liked, and that made it easier for me. If a problem came up, we fought and then it was resolved. With the girls, I could be playing and then suddenly realize that they were all exchanging these weird looks. Then I would know that I’d said or done something that wasn’t right, but no one would tell me exactly what I’d done. I remember wondering how in the world I was going to learn right from wrong if they wouldn’t tell me what I’d done

wrong.

I leave the favela completely exhausted but feeling wonderful inside. It’s not where you come from; it’s where you belong that matters. And it’s OK to feel like you belong in more than one place.

Sometimes you meet people you only get to be with for a short time. What’s difficult is accepting that and moving on. But sometimes that may be what you have to do. Accept that a relationship is only a loan, and when it’s not there anymore, you should rejoice at having had the honor of having it at all, of receiving so much without needing to give. Maybe it didn’t end the way you wanted or expected. Maybe it ended before it really had a chance to begin, or ended without your having a chance to say goodbye.

Emotions are so powerful. They can say more than words ever can. One glance between us conveyed so much love and pain, fear and hope, and through all this, I think we both knew that we didn’t have much time left.

Anyone who claims that blood is thicker than water, that the ties in a family who share the same genes are stronger, does not understand how love works.

Being by her side during her chemo treatments made me realize just what vitality she possessed. Despite the all-consuming, debilitating therapy, she still talked about the future and everything she hoped for. We never know our strength until life tests us. But most of all, we don’t know what strength and power another person has until we follow them for a while on their journey.

Every day the compact, heavy, painful lump of unspoken emotion grew bigger still in my chest. I was lost, but we didn’t talk about it. No one in the family talked about the unavoidable. We took it one day at a time. We felt and we grieved, but we didn’t talk.

How was I supposed to say goodbye when I didn’t want to strip you of your hope? As long as you were breathing, we could still pretend there was hope.

I felt trapped. That was a lifelong promise, and I didn’t know if I was strong enough to handle it. I didn’t know if I could bear it. But how could I be selfish in this moment and say no, or say that I’d do my best but that I couldn’t promise anything? So I responded the way you’re supposed to in a situation like that. I said what would give her a little hope for those of us she loved and was leaving. “I’ll take care of them, Mama. Don’t worry. Patrick will be fine.” I said Patrick because

Death has the ability to hang over you, enough so that you feel alive but wish to be gone.

I think that we often underestimate the significance we have to others. We don’t fully understand what we can accomplish for another person. What you do with the time you have available is what counts.

but nothing has ever beaten or will ever beat the feeling I had when I got that box of Bon O Bon chocolates from my biological mother when I was lost and alone at the orphanage. Nothing can beat the way I felt when my adoptive mother gave me Helen Exley’s book To a Very Special Daughter or what I felt when we sat in that movie theater together. Love can’t be bought, manufactured, or elicited on request. It’s a gift that we choose to give and to receive.

It’s unselfish and maybe it can’t move mountains, but it can do something even better: it can save a life.

Mamãe sees my tears and all but apologizes for not crying herself. She says that she’s gone through so much in her life that she doesn’t cry very easily anymore. I give her the warmest smile I can and say that I really understand and that I can cry for us both. I don’t know how much of that Rivia manages to translate before my aunts get going at full speed.

I find out that Mamãe spent another fourteen years living on the street after Patrick and I were adopted. It makes me sad to hear that life was so hard on her for so long.

For the last twenty-four years, no one in my family has known where we were or even if we were still alive. I listen as they talk, and I feel sad. Imagine not knowing where your children are, not knowing whether they’re alive.

Vitoria says that my mother has never stopped. They have often found her barefoot, wandering the streets with bloody feet, and when they’ve picked her up and brought her back, she’s disappeared again, back out there searching for us. Vitoria says that from the day my mother moved in with her, one of my cousins would sometimes take my mother out in the car and just drive around for hours so she could search for her children.

my biological father’s name was Beto and that he was murdered when I was little.

One day when my mother, the youngest of that whole flock of children, was four years old, he took his own life. He shot himself in the head.

After all, bygones are bygones. What could have been done better, who did or didn’t do what, what does that matter now? What would be the point of being angry at my family? The future will be what we make it, and I’m not planning to wreck the chance for me and my Brazilian family to find

I’ve learned that a person can be stripped of everything, but also that everything is possible as long as you never stop walking.

If we’re subjected to the smallest extra amount of pain, pain that then joins forces with guilt, and then together they find their way home to loneliness, we will find ourselves putting up the strongest of walls. Walls that reason can never penetrate. Reason basically does what it’s good at: it works its way around, over, and under the walls.

My grandmother gave birth to twenty or twenty-one children. My grandfather took his own life. My mother jumped out a window to escape from her brother. My father was murdered. One of my brothers is dead, and no one knows where the other one is, and above all—my mother has schizophrenia. I’ve got all I can deal with right now just

trying to process all this.

I don’t believe

that life is about finding yourself. For me, life is about creating your own reality. And I ask myself this question: Who do I want to be?

Where is the morality in a society that lines up innocent children and guns them down in

cold blood? What does society expect abused, vulnerable children to grow up and become? Well-adjusted, contributing citizens? These children are growing up with their souls crushed. They will act out based on what they’ve learned. Why should they make any effort when no one has ever made any effort for them?

We’re built to take significantly more than we think we can. But we’re often selfish, and when everything comes to a head, when it’s a matter of survival, most people choose to fight at the expense of others. I wish I hadn’t had to witness this. I’m neither bad nor good, better nor worse. I’m a human being, just like all the rest who carry this kind of heavy baggage. But I did receive something fundamental that all people need: the knowledge that there’s love and that extreme poverty does not prevent love. My biological mother, my brother, Camile, and

Change is painful. It’s uncomfortable and sometimes even distressing. But if we embrace the change and look at the positive in it and strive to make the best of it, there’s so much good to be gained. Viewing situations as us versus them is dangerous. No good can come of that mentality. I fervently hope that no army in Sweden or anywhere else will need to be part of what I experienced in Brazil. I don’t want to see societies filled with good people changed to such

an extent that we close our eyes to a young girl being murdered without punishing the perpetrators. This must never feel normal. I never want us to look at another individual and think we’re more valuable because we’re richer or have a different skin color, sexual orientation, or religion.