Guest Post: Mitch Albom on the Inspiration Behind Finding Chika

Nearly twenty years ago, I started writing a book called The Five People You Meet in Heaven. At one point in that story, the lead character, Eddie, is talking to his wife, Marguerite, about adopting a baby, as they weren’t able to have kids of their own. Eddie says they’re too old now. Marguerite replies, “What’s too old to a child?”
I’m not sure how I came up with that sentence. What’s too old to a child? I had just turned forty. My wife Janine and I had recently married, but our efforts to have children had been unsuccessful. Perhaps it started there.
Still, it was just a line in a novel. Janine and I would not personally face the question until nearly fifteen years later, when we were in our mid-fifties, and a young Haitian girl named Chika entered out lives, needing help to stay alive.
And suddenly all notions of being “too old” went out the window.
This is the backdrop of my new non-fiction book, Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family. It’s the most personal story I have ever written. Twenty years after learning beside an old professor named Morrie Schwartz, I had a new life education, courtesy of a five-year-old girl.
Chika, whose last name was Jeune (which means, fittingly, young) was born three days before Haiti’s devastating earthquake of 2010. She somehow survived it, even though her family’s cinderblock house collapsed around her. She slept that night in the sugarcane fields. So she was born tough. And tough she would stay.
When she was two years old, her mother died giving birth to a baby brother. Not much later, Chika was brought to an orphanage I operate in Port Au Prince. Her godmother carried her in.
Chika stuck her tongue out at me during the intake interview. I laughed and she laughed back. I fell for her immediately.
Chika was brash and bold from the start. She told our older kids where to stand in line, when they could eat, who should get the soccer ball. She was so young, they couldn’t take offense. They mostly laughed and enjoyed her.
Then one day, when she was five, Chika’s mouth and eye began to droop on the left side. An MRI machine revealed something in her brain that a local doctor summed up this way: “Whatever it is, there is no one in Haiti who can help you.”
And so Janine and I brought Chika to our home in Michigan, hoping that America’s medical excellence could remove whatever was in her brain was and set her back on her childhood path—and an eventual return to her homeland.
It didn’t happen.
Chika, we learned, had something called DIPG, a stage IV cancerous tumor that is sadly always fatal—often within six months of diagnosis. From the moment we got that news in a doctor’s office, everything my wife and I knew about time, age and children was turned on its ear. Chika never moved back to Haiti. Instead, the three of us spent nearly two years together traveling the world in search of a cure.
What we found, along the way, was a family.
What’s too old to a child? We asked ourselves that question early on, then quickly moved past it, because Chika had her life to live and we were determined to make it last. It didn’t matter that we were two or three decades older than the parents of kids she would play with, any more than it mattered that we were not her birth parents. Names, titles, ages all melt away when you are entrusted with the life of a little one.
Sometimes Chika asked how old I was and I’d say “Guess!” and she’d squeal “Thirty!” and I’d say “Nope” and she’d try, “A hundred!” I quickly realized that old phrase “age is just a number” is literally true for young children. They don’t get what forty or sixty means. They only know if you will play with them or not. Eat with them or not. Put them to bed or not. Hold them or not.
We did all of the above. We never stopped. I found that, quite to the contrary of being “too old”, the pent-up love and affection that we had never spent on children of our own came gushing forth for little Chika. We took her everywhere. We showed her everything. We sang her lullabys. I reveled in our play, our swimming, our reading books together until she fell asleep against my chest.
I would ask her sometimes if she knew how much I loved her and when she coyly said no, I’d stretch my arms all the way out and then lock my hands behind me, saying “Thiissss much.” It always made her laugh, and calmed her as it calmed me.
This is not to say that we didn’t feel our years. Waking up in the middle of the night to tend to her needs wasn’t easy at our age. Lifting her from place to place, especially as the disease robbed her of the ability to walk, became a genuine physical hardship. I developed a hernia that would need an operation.
But there was never a thought of slowing down. We flew her back and forth to New York for experimental treatments. We lived briefly in Cologne, Germany to try an immunology approach. Through it all—making scrambled eggs with her, watching her beat us in card games, seeing her put her hand over my mouth when I tried to sing with her (because Chika was always a solo act) we melded into an unlikely family. How old she was, where she came from, or what we endured together was all secondary to the love that was forged.
If we were blessed to have the best possible child under the worst possible circumstances, so be it.
I once told Chika I had to stop coloring because it was time to go to my job. She crossed her arms and made a face. “Your job is carrying me!” she said.
And she was right. We carried her through the happy months and the inevitable down months and through the doctors and hospitals and homecare that the disease finally demanded. We never lamented carrying her, because that, in my now altered view, is what we are here to do. To carry children. Our children, and other less fortunate children if we can.
It is an honorable weight.
What’s too old to a child? No age is too old. Not if you love them. Not if you nurture them. Chika taught me that, and a thousand other things. Bob Dylan once wrote “may you stay forever young” but you don’t need a wish—having children in your life does that for you. We were incredibly blessed to have Chika for the time that we did. Her glow still lights our days.
Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family is on B&N bookshelves now.