Finding Chika: A heart-breaking and hopeful story about family, adversity and unconditional love

by Mitch Albom

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

I thought starting a family was like a new carpet I could store in a closet and unroll when I was ready.

am often amazed by how little a child needs to know you to want your embrace.

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

You were smaller than me, yes. But what if this challenge was bigger than both of us?

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”

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.”

Except an old man looking back on his years is not a little girl looking forward to hers.

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

I don’t know how many hours we spent just looking at you, Chika, but there were many, and they were treasured.

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.

A child is like a little ball of time unfurling.

Every night that you said your prayers, we later said our own, silently asking for someone in a lab, maybe halfway around the world, to be peering through a microscope and whispering, “Look, it’s working.”

life was still full of undiscovered treasures.

Hopelessness can be contagious. But hope can be, too, and there is no medicine to match

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.