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

by Mitch Albom

“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.

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

There are many kinds of selfishness in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time, because none of us know how much we have, and it is an affront to God to assume there will be more.

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 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.”

And, as it turns out, you can have more than one journey of your life.

Ambition is not something I ever warned you about, Chika, but I have learned it can overtake you gradually, like clouds moving across the sun, until, consumed by pursuing it, you get used to a dimmer existence.

The most precious thing you can give someone is your time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.

One of the best things a child can do for an adult is to draw them down, closer to the ground, for clearer reception to the voices of the earth.

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.

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