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

by Mitch Albom

After a while, you make peace with the truth: love determines our bonds. It always comes down to that.

“What will you do while I sleep?” “I’ll read,” I said. “And think about how much I love you.” You nodded, your eyes glazed. “That’s what I’ll do, too.”

Kids and farewells are a difficult mix.

It is hugely stressful, grappling with a child’s illness, wondering if you are making the right moves. You feel lost. Uncertain. One of you can feel confident when the other doesn’t, and you get angry at the difference.

“Why are you crying, Chika?” “Because,” she whispered, “I don’t know how.” “You don’t know how to what?” “To make you happy now.”

Janine asked Chika where she thought she’d meet the boy she would marry. “A restaurant,” she answered. I chuckled at her imagination. Then I realized Janine and I had met at a restaurant. We’d told her that once. Chika. Honestly. She remembered everything.

All you want to see is “What is the cure?” But it is never that simple.

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.

To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, because we could not stop for joy, you kindly stopped instead. You awed us with your spirit.

For a stretch, we attempted to keep up their normal activities, going to movies, rolling them into restaurants, relying on home health care workers to lift them in and out of cars. But the world slowed down. Only certain places would accommodate us. I watched my parents sometimes, slumped back in resignation, tired shadows of their once energized selves. I could not put you in a wheelchair, Chika, without a choking in my chest.

Oh shit why I understand such thing, it hurts that I actually relate to this.

Then they infused you with something called Newcastle virus, a disease that is deadly to chickens but not dangerous to humans. The presence of the virus caused a response in the body’s immune system, which they studied by removing cells after five days. The hope was that whatever defense your own body created, they could boost by loading the altered cells into the previously removed ones, then changing them in the lab, millions of them, then injecting them back into your body in a vaccine. The changed cells would, in theory, stimulate your immune cells to attack the DIPG tumor.

It was like training your own army to fight an enemy you created. Which is pretty much what cancer is.

it was yours. More importantly, we were yours.

“People don’t have to know you to pray for you, honey. They can just pray because you’re a beautiful little girl and they want you to be healthy, right? And you can pray for them, too.”

So there was prayer wherever the day took you. But it was mostly ritual and gratitude. The prayers of desperation were left to us.

My prayers were more like pleading. Please, God, why does she have to go through this? Please, God, she’s just a little girl.

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.

C. S. Lewis, the man who wrote the Narnia books you so loved, once said it is easy to trust a rope as long as you’re using it to wrap a box. But when you’re clinging to it over a deadly precipice, it’s something else entirely. As your condition worsened, my clinging became more desperate. I often got angry at the Lord.

“Oh, I was furious,” he said. 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.”

“You’re sitting there every day, revisiting a really hard time. It’s emotional. You’re grieving. You can’t be surprised that your body is reacting to that.” “But why now?” I say, pushing back. “I made peace with all this already, didn’t I?” Janine looks at me as if I’m being naive. “You loved her, Mitch.”

I looked back and saw the two of you, already entangled, pulling up the covers, and I felt something else, something big and warm and satisfying.

“If I get married and I have to go potty, who is going to help me out of my wedding dress?” It was Miss Janine who said, “I will.”

seeing you and Miss Janine together only left me more fulfilled.

I knew she gave everyone in her world, no matter what harm they’d done, a second and a third chance.

And I knew she loved me more than I deserved, took my side in any conflict, and would still, after twenty-seven years together, sound excited when I called her on the phone.

Miss Janine and I saw the hurt in your eyes. Sitting on the couch, you asked us, “Why doesn’t Aidan love me?” I wanted to grab the boy and make him stay next to you all night. But Miss Janine was more tender in her answer. She told you not to worry, that all things come in time, and that you were beautiful and she was so proud of you.

I think about her sitting beside you, long after you’d fallen asleep, praying for a miracle, then looking at me with tears in her eyes and whispering, “We can’t lose her, Mitch. We can’t.”

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.

“How come you don’t feel good, Mister Mitch?” What do you mean? “You have lots of hurts.” I don’t know, I say. The doctors can’t find anything. “Not those hurts.”

Please, just stop here and we’ll be grateful. But we don’t get to set our stops.

Are you aware that Emmanuel is studying to be a doctor, because he wants to help children after what happened to you? Can you see the influence you still have, even being gone? Is that a blessing bestowed on us when this life is over? Or is it just a fierce and desperate hope we have on Earth, like the one we had about finding you a cure, something that remained forever beyond our control?

It was the happiest and most heartbreaking birthday I have ever experienced.

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

It’s hard for me to explain how helpless I was feeling, Chika, unable to fight beside you in whatever battle was raging in your head. How were you so strong?

Finally Miss Janine, tears dripping down her cheeks, took a deep breath and whispered, “It’s all right now, Chika. . . . You can go be with your mommy in heaven.” She broke down, sobbing, and my heart snapped in two, because I knew how hard that was to say. And I knew that you would listen to her. Two breaths. One.

I know this is all in my head. I know you can’t really be here in front of me. But I want to tell you something while you are.

It’s not the time she spent battling we lament. It’s the growing up she missed. The time she didn’t get. The future she never saw. That still seems so unfair.

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.