BOOK: THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN
AUTHOR: MITCH ALBOM
PAGES: 231
BLURB:
‘All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know
it at the time…’
On his eighty-third birthday, Eddie, a lonely war
veteran, dies in a tragic accident trying to save a little girl from a falling
cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hand in his—and then nothing.
He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden
of Eden but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people
who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet
each of them changed your path for ever.
MY TAKE ON THIS BOOK:
‘No
story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they
cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.’
Well, it is my second read and the first time I’ve
read this book, I didn’t start reviewing books.
And you know? everytime I recall this book ‘The Five People You Meet In
Heaven’ a smile curves up in my face.
Because if not for a dear friend of mine, I would have never encountered
this book.
What I like the most in this book is the ending. Where
it says, ‘The life of each affects the
other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the
stories are all one.’
The book starts with the first chapter titled ‘THE END’
and it is because the book is all about Eddie’s life and more about his
death.
NOW
WHO IS EDDIE?
Eddie basically followed the suit of his father and
ended up working as a maintenance guy for the rest of his life in Ruby Pier
which was an amusement park. He longed to leave this place, find different
work, build another kind of life. but the war came, his plans never worked out
and in time he found himself graying and wearing looser pants and in a state of
weary acceptance, that this was who he was and who he would always be, a man
with sand in his shoes in a world of mechanical laughter and grilled
frankfurters.
The first person Eddie met in heaven was ‘THE BLUE
MAN’. He made Eddie understand the fact that ‘there are five people you meet in heaven and each of them were in your
life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at that time, and that is
what heaven is for. For understanding your life at earth.’
People
think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds
and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.
The Blue Man tells Eddie a story and then viewed it
from two different angles. It was the same day, the same moment, but one angle
ends happily at an arcade, with the little boy in tawny pants dropping pennies
into the Erie Digger machine, and the other ends badly, in a city morgue.
The Blue Man died because of Eddie, and when Eddie
shook his head uttering it wasn’t fair, the man replied saying ‘Fairness, does
not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.’
The second person Eddie met was the Captain. What he
learnt from the Captain is that ‘Sometimes
when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just
passing it on to someone else.’
The third person Eddie met was Ruby, the woman who
was the one the Amusement park was named after. What Eddie learnt from her was
– ‘Holding anger is a poison. It eats you
from inside. 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’
The fourth person Eddie met was his beloved wife,
Marguerite. She died at the age of 47. What he learnt from her was that ‘Life has to end but love doesn’t’
When life ends, memory becomes the partner and we
nurture it, we hold it, live with it. Life will end one day but memories will
stay till the end.
The fifth person and the last person Eddie met in
Heaven was the little girl. The girl who was burnt in the yellow flames when he
was held as a captive in the war. With the little girl, Eddie admitted that he
was sad. Sad because he didn’t do anything with his life. accomplished nothing.
But the answer he was seeking since the time he
reached this newfound land made him feel
better. He lightened up to know the fact that he saved someone.
Who was that someone? how did he save? What all
Eddie suffered in life? how did he die? And how he played a role in the life of
each person he met in heaven?
I am leaving it to you.
P.S- Can I
call it a mystery book? May be I can! Well this book has a special place in my
heart. And I would be glad if you give it a try and let me know if you liked
it.
Overall rating: 4.5/5
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