Finding Grace in Grief
With his latest memoir, Mitch Albom revisits love, loss, and the meaning of family
Mitch Albom doesn’t shy away from the freighted themes of death and the afterlife. The author of seven New York Times best sellers, those titles include The Five People You Meet in Heaven and Tuesdays with Morrie, the best-selling memoir of all time. In addition to his prolific literary career, Albom also founded SAY Detroit in 2006 which oversees nine full-time charities in the Metro Detroit area. In 2010, he began operating the Have Faith Haiti Mission Orphanage.
In his latest memoir, Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family, Albom returns to the theme grief with the story of an adopted Haitian daughter called Chika, who becomes ill, leaving Albom and his wife scrambling to find a cure. He joined Zibby Owens on her podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books to discuss the book, the similarities and differences with his past work, and writing as catharsis.
Read an excerpt below and follow the link to listen to the entire interview.
ZO: Chika came to you in the beginning of this book. She’s one of the characters, not just in the past tense, but also as you’re writing it. Much of the book is describing the process of writing, and how it’s difficult for you to write. It’s very personal. Yet Chika kept coming into the room, literally, while you were writing. Can you tell me more about that experience?
MA: First of all, when you write a book like this, you don’t want people to be scared of it or think, “I can’t read a book about a child who dies. It’s too sad.” They would be missing a great story. I understand the feeling. Right from the first page, you know that she died already. It’s not one of those books that you go along while she’s getting sicker. You know she died because I say that she died, but yet she’s back in the story.
Chika would always come downstairs with me in the morning. I get up early. She got up early. I wanted to let my wife sleep because the day was hard enough. Chika would come down with me. We’d sit in my office. I’d give her a magic marker or a pad or a doll or whatever. I would try to write my books. She would sit at my feet. I’d say, “Chika, you have to be quiet.” Of course, in two minutes she’d say, “Can I have another marker? Can I have a pad? What are you doing? What are you writing about?”
Her dialogue and her conversation was so much a part of who she was. She was so funny. She butchered the English language in such a way that was so endearing. I thought, I’ve got to make this a conversation. She’s saying to me, “When are you going to start writing about me?” Of course, I had been delaying doing that because I was dealing with my grief and not sure how to do it. But she coaxes me through it. The whole book is a conversation with her. If you really want to know what our relationship was, it was a verbal relationship. Yes, we played physically. I lifted her and carried her and all that. First and foremost, it was the way she communicated. I thought that would be the best way to tell the story.
ZO: In the book, you also reference time that you spent with Morrie, from your famous book Tuesdays with Morrie, and how he had told you that his last months “proved to be the most vibrant and likened them to the brilliant colors of a dying leaf.” When you go through this with Chika’s illness, I was wondering, did you see that same sort of vibrancy in the waning days of her life? Do you think that it only comes with the wisdom of old age?
MA: It’s different with a child. There are several things that were different and several things that were the same with Tuesdays with Morrie. Ironically, it was twenty years to the week I found out that Morrie had ALS that I found out Chika had DIPG, this terrible, stage-four brain tumor, twenty years to the week.
With Morrie, I sat alongside a dying older man and learned a tremendous amount of lessons about my life and as it turned out, other people’s lives. With Chika, I didn’t so much sit alongside as play alongside and carry alongside and travel alongside. It was still time spent with what turned out to be a dying little girl. I also had my eyes opened and illuminated and learned so many things that I try to put in the book in seven lessons, one for each year that she lived on earth. The difference was with Morrie, I never felt like I was supposed to save him. With Chika, I did.
ZO: I’m sorry. [emotional] It’s heartbreaking.
MA: When I didn’t save her, then I felt like I had failed. For a long time, I had to fight that. Whereas with Morrie, I felt it was inevitable. He was seventy-eight. He knew it was coming. He accepted it. Chika didn’t know what was coming. That was her blessing. We didn’t spend any of the two years that we had together talking about, “Chika, what have you learned about life now that you know you’re going to die?” She didn’t have any idea that she was going to die. We kept it that way. I’m glad that we did. I know there are some parents who deal with these situations who feel like transparency is the most important thing and explain to the kid why they’re going to the hospital and explain what cancer is and explain what a tumor is.
I fully respect that position, but I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. I wanted Chika to remain the beautiful child that she was. We turned it into childhood trips and childhood adventures and childhood whatever. The few times in her life that she asked, “Why are we going to the doctor?” I would say, “He’s going to help you walk better. He’s going to help you feel better. Then we’ll go back to Haiti.” It was always, “When can I go back to Haiti?” Until she lost her awareness and ability to speak, which is one of the byproducts of this disease, she was a child. She was hopeful. She was optimistic. That’s the gift that we can give her. There were many similarities between Morrie, but there was that one big difference.
ZO: Do you feel that writing about her helped? Did that help you process it? I know you came down with all sorts of physiological symptoms as you were trying to write about it.
MA: That was weird. I found it to be cathartic when I began it, and all these conversations cropped up in my mind. I could write what she would say or how she would sing:
“Doe, a deer, a email deer.”
I’d say, “No, Chika, it’s female.”
“What?”
“Female, not email.”
“No, it’s my mouth. I can say what I want.”
That’s her logic. I put those moments in. Recreating those conversations, that was joyous in its own way. But you’re right, I did get quite sick. I thought, quite frankly, that I was having a stroke or multiple. I would get dizzy. My right side would go numb and couldn’t feel my feet and my cheek. At one point, they raced me to the hospital and took all these tests. Ultimately, it was determined that it was grief combined with a lot of dehydration and too much coffee and caffeine. In a certain way, I don’t mind paying a physical price for having to write this story because that’s the price of loving a child. I’m okay with that now.
