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

Content Warning: The source material and this guide include extensive discussion of terminal illness in a child.

Mitch Albom opens Finding Chika after the seven-year-old girl’s death. Albom describes his grief and struggles to confront the loss of Chika, who died of diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), an aggressive and terminal type of tumor that starts in the brain stem, despite Albom and his wife’s efforts to find a cure. A year after her death, in April of 2018, Albom sits in his office, and the ghost of Chika appears. This has been a regular occurrence since her death, particularly after a long period of numbness and disengagement with the world. Chika is cheeky and brazen and tells Albom he needs to start writing her story. She warns him that he could forget about her if he doesn’t find a way to keep her. Albom wonders if he is emotionally ready to confront one of the most tremendous losses of his life but agrees to try to write if Chika stays with him. He thinks of one of Chika’s favorite books, The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, in which Christopher Robin asks Pooh to remember him forever, and Pooh isn’t sure it’s a promise he can keep.