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

Author:Mitch Albom [Albom, Mitch]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780062952394
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

“Malè pa gen klakson.”

[Misfortune doesn’t have a horn.]

—Haitian proverb

Lesson Four

Kid Tough

Chad Carr passed away.

The cherubic little blond-haired boy whose father carried him onto the Michigan football field died exactly fourteen months after his DIPG diagnosis. I shivered when I heard the news. Janine started crying.

Because his grandfather was a famous coach, Chad’s death made news across the country, and brought a rare spotlight to this horrific disease. People were reminded that Neil Armstrong, before he ever walked on the moon, lost his two-year-old daughter to the same affliction in 1962. Little had changed in all those years. DIPG remained a wrathful thief, preying on children, robbing families of their present and their future.

The Carr family started a foundation in their son’s memory. They called it Chad Tough. And while you are not here for me to read this to you, Chika, I want to say what I have learned about that word, tough, because children, especially sick children, have a toughness unique to their young souls, one that can comfort even the fretting adults around them.

This is something you taught me.

This is fourth on my list.

Let me share an example. There was a night in Sloan Kettering hospital, during our second try at the CED process, when you were again being infused with the radioactive iodine antibody. It traveled from a large box, through a long tube, and down the catheter into your head.

This was around 3:00 a.m. I was sleeping in a chair across from your bed behind the leaded half wall. For some reason, my eyes flicked open, and in the darkness, I saw you standing right in front of me, your head tilted, like something from a horror movie. The catheter was poking up from your cranium, its cord stretched back as taut as a tightrope.

“Chika!” I screamed.

“I want to go to the toy store,” you rasped.

I rushed you back to the bed, praying you hadn’t yanked the catheter loose. I yelled for the nurses, who raced in, stunned. For the next hour, we waited anxiously until Dr. Souweidane arrived. He, too, was astonished. None of his patients had ever gotten out of bed during that procedure, let alone walk across a room.

Thankfully, you did no damage, and we all collapsed with relief. Come morning, you barely remembered it.

Kid Tough. I have been to many children’s hospitals, and every visit pays witness to the word resilience: youths playing board games during chemo infusions, or holding IV poles as they hurry down hallways to an arts and crafts room.

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. Even at the mission, when nearly all our kids contracted a painful, mosquito-spread virus called chikungunya, you simply lay in the gazebo with a cold towel on your head, enduring the symptoms.

That day you threw up in the pool, I rushed home to find Miss Janine holding you.

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