Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family

by Mitch Albom

When I was One, I had just begun. When I was Two, I was nearly new. When I was Three, I was hardly me. When I was Four, I was not much more. When I was Five, I was just alive. But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever, So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever. —A. A. Milne

“I don’t want you to forget me,” she mumbles. Oh, sweetheart, I say, that’s impossible. You can’t forget someone you love. She tilts her head, as if I don’t know something obvious. “Yes, you can,” she says.

Near the end of that particular story, a departing Christopher Robin says to Pooh, “Promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.” But the bear doesn’t promise. Not at first. Instead he asks, “How old shall I be then?”—as if he wants to know what he’s getting into. It reminded me of our orphanage in Haiti and how, the moment a visitor arrives, our children ask, “How long are you staying?” as if measuring the affection they should dole out. All of them have been left behind at some point, staring at the gate, tears in their eyes, waiting for someone to return and take them home. It happened to Chika. The person who brought her departed the same day. So perhaps this is what she means. You can forget your loved ones. Or at least not come back for them.

It was a tragedy on an island where tragedy is no stranger. Haiti, your homeland, is the second poorest nation in the world, with a history of hardship and many deaths, the kind that come too soon. But it is also a place of great happiness, Chika. A place of beauty and laughter and unshakable faith, and children—children who, in a rainstorm, will hook arms and dance spontaneously, then throw themselves to the ground in hysterics, as if they don’t know what to do with all their joy.

They say a child’s eyes are fully formed around age three, and that is why they appear so large on the face. Or maybe those years are just so full of wonder, the child can’t help it.

you can always pray wherever you are,

And that, Chika, was the beginning of providence moving our lives together, or the continuance of it, I should say, since the Lord doesn’t get ideas partway through a life.

It takes a special strength to take care of a child, Chika, and a whole different strength to admit you cannot.

Gradually, I had to face the fact that I could not control everything, no matter how fast my eyes darted from spot to spot. This was hard. I am not good at being vulnerable, Chika, or relying on the Lord to handle it all, even though many around me in Haiti were at peace under His watch. Protecting our kids became the biggest and most anxious priority in my life.

It began, as many good things do, with a coincidence.

(“land of high mountains” is the aboriginal meaning of the word Haiti).

They were so joyous, doing something I all but sleepwalked through every morning of my life, that my heart shifted. I could physically feel it, an epiphany maybe, because that word means the manifestation of something divine, and that is how it felt, and how the following days there felt. I was exhausted yet elevated in an almost unearthly way.

I have always found something forgivable about children seeking attention and the lengths they will go to get it.

Anyone who has sat through that slice of time, when you don’t know something awful and then you do, will confirm that it is literally a bend in your life, and what is critical is what you choose next; because you can view a diagnosis many ways—as a curse, a challenge, a resignation, a test from God.

I never said no to anything for fear I wouldn’t be asked again.

“Dying is only one thing to be sad about, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else”—that

With the terminally ill, I shared Morrie’s observation that his last months proved his most vibrant; he likened them to the vivid colors of a dying leaf. With the healthy, I repeated Morrie’s mantra of pretending each day to have a bird on your shoulder, a bird that you ask, “Is today the day I die?”—and to live each day as if the answer were “Yes.”

A child is both an anchor and a set of wings. My old way of doing things was gone. Time changes. With a little one, it is no longer your own. All parents will tell you this.

Everything in this world is music if you can hear it. Make a joyful noise, the psalm says.

I could marvel at the world the way you did. You were an unfailing antidote to adult preoccupation. All you had to say was, “Look!” Look. It’s one of the shortest sentences in the English language. But we don’t really look, Chika. Not as adults. We look over. We glance. We move on.

Children wonder at the world. Parents wonder at their children’s wonder. In so doing, we are all together young.

So you taught me that, Chika. Or rekindled it, if that sense of wonder remains a pilot light inside us all.

a man provides for his family and his contentment is found in that.

Age is such a thief.

A child is like a little ball of time unfurling.

“Malè pa gen klakson.” [Misfortune doesn’t have a horn.] —Haitian proverb

I want to say what I have learned about that word, tough, because children, especially sick children, have a toughness unique to their young souls, one that can comfort even the fretting adults around them.

And while we recovered to offer the standard adult response, that love doesn’t care about sickness or health, inside we were trembling, because we saw in you something, with your disease, that we were terrified of seeing in ourselves. Acceptance.

I knew she would need fight to get through this. So, OK, I figured. Argue if need be. Yell and scream. Do not go gently.

Pope John XXIII once said, that it’s easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father?

I wonder, Chika, if anyone has blind claim over a child, save for God. I have witnessed the purest connection between an adoptive mother and her children, and I have witnessed helpless infants shunned by those who birthed them. The opposite also happens. After a while, you make peace with the truth: love determines our bonds. It always comes down to that.

At that moment, I didn’t care about who belonged to whom. I was yours, even if you were not mine. And as I stroked your forehead, which was hot to the touch, I knew I always would be.

Hope is critical. It is almost mandatory to soldier through troubled times. Conversely, there is no affliction like hopelessness. I believe it is worse than anything that strikes the flesh.

life was still full of undiscovered treasures. Hopelessness can be contagious. But hope can be, too, and there is no medicine to match it.

Surely there is a future, and hope will not be cut off. That’s from Proverbs.

“Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.” —Dr. John Trainer

If I could change anything from those moments, Chika, it would be to stay in them a little longer. Immerse ourselves so we never forget. I rarely use the word rejoice in daily life, but it is the word I am looking for here. Rejoice. Revel in the funny business.

Then why didn’t you stop believing? “Because,” he said, “as terrible as I felt, I took comfort in having something I could cry to, a power to whom I could shout, ‘Why?’ It is still better than having nothing to turn to at all.”

Love, apparently, can at times be too heavy.

Men often fear that once they start a family, their wives will focus more on the kids, and their relationship will dwindle into car pools, chores, and laundry. This is based on something pretty childish in itself: an unwillingness to share attention.

all things come in time,

“I’m no longer a slave to fear I am a child of God.”

We adults can be a wretched lot, Chika. Yet in every child’s face we see the Lord has not given up on us. Yours was proof of that.

we don’t get to set our stops.

cherish every moment, which is sometimes all a family can do.

“I sing because I’m happy I sing because I’m free His eye is on the sparrow And I know He watches me.”

MWEN SE PITIT BONDYE “I am a child of God.”

The world is an amazing place.

But none of us are assured of tomorrow. It’s what we do with today that makes an impact.

Families are like pieces of art, they can be made from many materials. Sometimes they are from birth, sometimes they are melded, sometimes they are merely time and circumstance mixing together, like eggs being scrambled in a Michigan kitchen. But no matter how a family comes together, and no matter how it comes apart, this is true and will always be true: you cannot lose a child. And we did not lose a child. We were given one. And she was glorious.