The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom

I have recently read this book and it really touched me. It’s a novel about earth and heaven, life and death which tells us that death is not the end of everything and that what happens on earth is just the beginning. It’s a fiction novel that explores the idea that heaven is not a place; it’s an answer.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven describes what happens to Eddie after he died on his 83rd birthday. Eddie awakens in the afterlife where he learns that he will meet five people; beloved ones or total strangers who had an effect on his past life. Everyone who met Eddie in heaven teaches him a certain lesson. Each lesson gives him some answers to the questions he kept asking himself forever. The truth is finally revealed to him and he is able to make connections, build conclusions that enabled him to understand the meaning of his life on earth. After Eddie meets the five people he was supposed to meet in heaven, he no longer feels the anger, sadness and confusion that he once felt and his is soul is finally floats freely in heaven.

I am quoting some lines from each of the five lessons that Eddie learned in heaven:

There are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate a life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.

Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re passing it to someone else.

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.

Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.

He was nothing now, a leaf in the water, and she pulled him gently, through shadow and light, through shades of blue and ivory and lemon and black, and he realized all these colors, all along, were the emotions of his life.