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Mitch Albom’s “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” is one of those wonderful little books that you can read in a single setting if you have a few hours to yourself on a rainy afternoon. After finishing it, I came away knowing that I would recommend this book to a number of friends. I knew some might give me a funny little look because of its title. After all, wouldn’t recommending a book about “heaven” imply that you and your friends believe in an afterlife and, in particular, one in which there exists a “heaven”—the dwelling place of a “god” and where one lives in everlasting pleasure? I was guessing that when some of them read the very first paragraph, they would put the book to the side, for Albom begins his fable,
“This is a story about a man names Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
Indeed, the rest of the first chapter is a recounting of the events that occurred during the few remaining hours of Eddie’s life. “I certainly don’t want to read about death,” I could hear some of them saying to me the next time we would meet and I would ask them if the enjoyed the book. But the book isn’t really about death at all. Nor does Album’s story require a belief in a “heaven”. The ultimate truths that it contains about the connectedness of our lives with the lives of others do not require the reader to be of any particular religious persuasion whatsoever. Albom uses Eddie’s death and his journey thereafter as a transition that helps him to begin to understand the connectedness of his own life with others and, with this understanding, the meaning of his life.
There are five stories within the story, each a flashback to an incident or a period of time in Eddie’s life. As he meets each of the five people on his journey — the “Blue Man” who dies in an accident and teaches Eddie to look at the stories from different angles, the captain that shot Eddie during the war, the old lady who tells him as he relives some of the strained relation he had with his father, “You have peace when you make it with yourself”, his wife Marguerite who he is angry with for dying of cancer so young who reminds him, “Life has to end. Love doesn’t”, and the young girl Tala who he meets by the river and implores him, “You make good for me. You wash me.” — they explain to him how they have been connected to his life, some for a brief but important moment in their own lives, others over the course of years of familiarity. Each story teaches more than one lesson about life. Eddie, like many people, questions what he has done with his life. He had lived simply. He was a maintenance man for a beach-side amusement park all of his adult life after returning home from the war. What could his life have amounted to? As we learn through the five stories, quite a bit.
In the rendering of this fable, Albom presents us with issues to reflect on as we deal with the cancer that has entered, uninvited, into our lives. Here are a few: “No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone”; “We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do we do to ourselves”; and “Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
I wonder who were the five people that Liddy met in heaven. What stories did they tell her? What did she learn about her life?
In peace,
Bruce
Bruce Shriver Editor-in-Chief, ESUN
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