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

by Mitch Albom

“Promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.”

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.

You can forget your loved ones. Or at least not come back for them.

It feels like yesterday. It feels like forever.

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. You were happy there in that way once, even very poor.

although you can always pray wherever you are, you know this from your teachings.

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.

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.

They were so joyous, doing something I all but sleepwalked through every morning of my life, that my heart shifted.

It was adults who brought me to Haiti, Chika, but it was children that brought me back.

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

“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.

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.

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

With all those amusement park attractions calling, you got low to marvel at another living creature.

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.

Sometimes life throws a saddle on you before you are ready to run.

They say as you age you become more and more like your parents.

children, especially sick children, have a toughness unique to their young souls, one that can comfort even the fretting adults around them.

Do you remember Beauty and the Beast, I ask? “Yeah. It’s about a girl who has to save her father.”

love determines our bonds.

Hope is critical.

When you write, you also feel like you are in conversation, and sometimes I wrote my thoughts down, as if God could read them, and I asked for strength.

What we carry defines who we are. And the effort we make is our legacy.

What you carry is what defines you.

we’d lose every memory we ever had before we would let go of yours.

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

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.

Chika. Janine. Me. Us.