‘The Final Heartbeat of Life’

Born three days before an earthquake destroyed her home in Haiti, forcing her and her mother to live in a sugarcane field, Chika was a resilient little girl who taught him several lessons, author and sports writer Mitch Albom said at the January Series at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Chika and her mother were among the millions of Haitians who were displaced, while hundreds of thousands of others were killed or injured, by the earthquake that hit the country on Jan. 12, 2010.

In his new memoir Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family, from which the title of his talk derived, Albom described how he met Chika, why he and his wife, Janine, brought her to the United States, and what he learned from this little girl before she died of a brain tumor at the age of seven in 2017.

“As we tried to teach her things, she taught us,” said Albom, author of several books including the bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie.

Meeting in the Covenant Fine Arts Center at Calvin University, the January Series runs every weekday from 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. (EST) through Jan. 28. The presentations are available live at more than 60 remote webcast locations. The series is also streamed with audio only at 12:30 p.m. (EST).

The first lesson Chika taught Albom, he said, is that you are never too old to have a family. Married for more than 20 years, he and his wife had never had children and were the “favorite aunt and uncle” for an extended family of nieces and nephews.

But all of that started to change in 2012 after Chika’s mother died giving birth to a baby brother. Chika’s godmother, unable to care for her, brought her to the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage, which Albom and his wife had first visited right after the earthquake and subsequently came to operate as part of a philanthropy.

“Chika was tough; she had to be tough. After her mother died, her godmother brought her to our orphanage, where for every kid we can accept, there are 10 we can’t.”

They took Chika in, and she proved to be a feisty, bossy little girl who liked to stand at the front of the food line and tell everyone what to do. “She was loud and bossy, loud and curious, loud and loving,” said Albom.

When she was five, the country director of the orphanage called Albom, who had returned to the U.S., to tell him Chika’s face was drooping. He rushed to Haiti, and they took her to one of the few specialists there who might be able to treat her. The doctor diagnosed her with a mass on her brain, telling them no one in Haiti could treat her.

“We had to scramble to invent a birth certificate and get a medical visa to take her out of the country to Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor [Mich.],” he said. “They took out what they could of the tumor, but the doctor said this was a very bad type of tumor and told us she had only four months to live.”

The doctor suggested they take her back to Haiti to be with her friends. Hearing this, Albom said he wasn’t taking her back to Haiti to die. “We said we would fight for her for however long it would take.”

This fight started them on a journey that outlasted the four months the doctor had predicted. Chika lived for two more years — during which they sought medical care all over the world as together they became a family, barely spending any time apart.

“There had been just two of us for 20 years. Then one day there were three,” Albom said. “Three people at the dinner table. Three people in the car. Three people going to bed — and much earlier than the two people used to go to bed,” said Albom.

Besides the lesson about becoming a family, Chika taught him about time, he said. Where once there weren’t enough hours in the day to squeeze in all that needed to be done, with Chika “the clock melted, the schedule was out the window.”

Bound by deadlines and meetings and the radio show he hosts, Albom still needed to work. But something new took priority. He recalled making Chika breakfast and how she would eat a little and look out the window and eat some more and look out the window to see a squirrel. Then, after marveling at the squirrel, she would go back to eating.

“Breakfast took nearly an hour. The old ways of doing things were gone,” he said.

Yet another lesson had to do with everyday miracles. “Pretty much everything was a miracle — hot water coming out of a faucet, traffic lights. Mailboxes, for some reason. Grass and caterpillars and stones were miracles, as was TV, and especially the remote control,” said Albom. “She found wonder in the smallest moments.”

A fourth lesson had to do with how tough children are. When Chika went into medical treatments, she got through them. Waiting, Albom and his wife had tears in their eyes.

He recalled being in a cancer center when Chika had a small tube pumping experimental medicine deep into her brain. One night, as he slept in her hospital room, he sensed a stir and awoke to see Chika standing in front of him, the tube taut, stretching from the bed. “I want to go to the toy store,” she told the man she called “Mr. Mitch.”

They called for the doctor, who said he’d never seen someone get out of bed, let alone cross a room, with a tube connected to them that way. At the podium during his speech, Albom shook his head and smiled. “Imagine,” he said, “she wanted to go to Toys R Us” with that tube dripping medicine into her brain.

“I realized children adjust to pain; they find play in work. Her toughness made her tough road easier.”

Finding joy in the moment was a fifth lesson Chika passed on to him. “Even as the illness got worse, her mind kept growing, and she was blossoming into a fully formed young person,” Albom said. 

“I think of the tireless crooked smile on her face while she was playing miniature golf, which she didn’t really know how to play. She awed us with her spirit.” He also recalled taking her to Disney World. As they walked along, Albom wondered which of the fancy rides she might want to go on. But a duck waddled out from a nearby pond, and Chika, bursting with excitement, spent 10 minutes chasing it. 

Another lesson: Albom said he once thought that having a child would hurt his marriage, cutting into his career and taking time away from his relationship with his wife. Not only do you not lose your spouse, you gain a family, he said. “Janine seemed to be waiting all of her life to take care of Chika, and that reminded me how foolish I was.”

Finally, he learned of his real job. Once Chika could no longer walk, he carried her wherever she needed to go: up the stairs, into the kitchen, into the car, into the yard, from one building to another. “This was the best job that I ever had,” he said. It reminded him that for all of us we are defined by what we help to carry.

As Chika’s health declined, she still wanted to play and sing and spend time with her adoptive parents. She was living far from the destruction of that earthquake in Haiti and the orphanage where they first realized she was growing sick. She had a new home in Detroit. She reveled in discovering little things, and she eagerly invited Albom and his wife into those discoveries. 

A defining moment he’ll never forget, he said, was when he and Janine were lying in bed with Chika between them in her final moments as they counted down her final heartbeats.

It was tender and trying, devastating and yet oddly uplifting to be there with this child whom they had grown to love deeply, said Albom. As time ticked away, they gulped and cried and realized, even in those moments, what a gift Chika had been — she had brought the gift of life into their world and in the process had greatly expanded their world. 

Thinking about that, said Albom, you realize in the deepest of your relationships that “only in witnessing a final heartbeat of life do you experience the indescribable gift of life.”