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

by Mitch Albom

Maybe when you put your loved ones down on paper, you forever accept that reality of them, and maybe I don’t want to accept this reality,

You can’t forget someone you love.

“How long are you staying?” as if measuring the affection they should dole out.

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

But you were never lost, Chika. I want you to know that. There were people who loved you before we loved you.

But I knew this: when children were brought to our gate, I had to look past their appearances, because there were so many, and so much need, and for every child we could say yes to, even now, there are ten to whom we cannot.

For every thousand babies born, eighty will die before their fifth birthday.

When I asked how she would provide for the baby she was carrying, she cried out, “Ou mèt pran li tou,” you can have it as well. She was not being heartless. I believe that she loved her children—so much so that she wanted a safer life for them, even if it meant she could no longer see them every day.

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

“I don’t miss being maaaad,” she drawls. “I miss you telling me not to be.”

But on Christmas morning, we woke up to a silent house, and I sometimes found Miss Janine crying in our bedroom. It is all right not to have children if you don’t want them, Chika, but if you do, their absence can be aching. It was my fault.

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.

Protecting our kids became the biggest and most anxious priority in my life.

It is folly to compare America’s medical care system to Haiti’s. The challenges for doctors and nurses are almost unimaginable, the poverty, the malnutrition, patients’ lack of access to health care or education.

But they smiled and led me forward, and I realize now they were walking me into their world and, in time, into yours.

We counted “one, two, three” and opened the pressure. The water sprayed down and they howled in delight, as if experiencing the Lord’s first rainstorm. They splashed and laughed and sang and did a dance. 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.

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

“When will I fall in love?” she asked us one night.

“Why do you want to fall in love, Chika?” I asked. She made a face. “Because you fell in love”—she crossed her arms—“and I wanna fall in love!”

“And who do you want to fall in love with?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I want to fall in love with someone I never met before!” “Why?” “Because that’s how you did it. You fell in love with Miss Janine. And you haven’t met her before!”

In a way, she was saying she wanted a love like ours. It made us feel like we were doing something right.

But what if this challenge was bigger than both of us?

A child is both an anchor and a set of wings.

all we knew about time would change, from the way we used to spend it, to the way we cherished it.

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.

Suddenly, three. Three seats for a movie. Three seats in a shoe store, or a waiting room, or a dentist’s office.

“Why did you keep it?” Chika repeats. How do I answer? Because it once made us laugh? Because later it made us cry? Because I stare at it now and argue with God over why such a simple request could not have been granted?

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. You looked. Your eyes flickered with curiosity.

I want to write about your voice, Chika, because I think about it often, and I hear it all the time.

They say eyes are the reflection of the soul, Chika, but your voice was its echo, and we miss it every day.

Hope? Is it a good reason to do something?

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

When my father died, Chika, I felt rudderless in this world, with a deep, anguished yearning for a comfort no longer there.

“You can hide from people you like.” Why would you do that? “So they can find you!” Her little mouth falls open and her eyes go wide in disbelief. “Don’t you want people to FIND YOU?”

DIPG remained a wrathful thief, preying on children, robbing families of their present and their future.

You had that resilience, Chika. You had it in hospitals. You had it at the orphanage. In truth, you had it from your first week on Earth, when you slept in the fields with your mother and sisters.

You never asked what the pills were for. Instead you kept searching for laughs, as you did even in the unlikeliest moments.

But it wasn’t the mission. The mission would have meant dozens of children, laughing and yelling and racing to their classrooms, not a lonely kitchen table overlooking our backyard.

“Because Aidan will not marry a girl who cannot walk.” You said it so innocently, so matter-of-factly, that it robbed us of our breath. 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.

we hated taking anything away from her. We hated doing anything that reminded her of her sickness.

we refused to allow pity to replace teaching,

Sometimes she would say, “Mister Mitch, my head hurts,” and while I would say “Let me rub it” or give her a children’s aspirin, it would privately terrify me, because what if it wasn’t just a passing headache?

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

I remind myself I can never know the circumstances of his life, or its hardships. I remind myself he lost his partner, the mother of his children. Who knows how his world was overturned?

Please, she begged us, don’t give him up.

I hated the idea that you—or any of our kids—might ever feel unwanted.

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