First of all I had reservations about this book as I have never read a book quite like it. I have also never come across any of Mitch Albom’s books before, despite being informed by a friend that his books are meaningful. Since reading ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’, I am intrigued to read Albom’s other books due to how ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ is written and the lesson which shone in the book.
The notion for ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ is
“All ending are beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..."
Eddie, who is the main character, is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park called ‘Ruby Pier’. As he grows older, he becomes more dissatisfied with his life, living a daily routine of work, loneliness, and regret. Out of the blue whilst at a ordinary day at work, an accident occurs where a cart falls from a ride endangering a young girl. Eddie attempts to save this girl, but dies himself on his 83rd birthday. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not what it is said to be, instead it is a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five different people who were in it. The quote stated above (“All endings are beginnings…”) resounds throughout the book as each person he meets makes him rethink his life and realise that the end of his life is just the beginning to finding out what went wrong, and that there’s still optimism.
There are quotes which I adore from this book, such as:
“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.”
“When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole”
“”Strangers”, the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.””
“YOUNG MEN GO to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.”
“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.”
“That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
Albom for me, gives an astonishing original story which has changed my outlook on afterlife itself and ultimately, the meaning of our life here on earth. The book not only teaches about treasuring life itself, but it is also a fable of love, a warning about war, and a nod of the cap to the real people of this world, the ones who never get their names in lights.
Other books by Mitch Albom:
- ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’
- ‘For One More Day’
- ‘Have a Little Faith’
- ‘The Time Keeper’ (his newest work)
Critical praise:
“Five meetings, five different and surprising truths that gradually unveil to Eddie one of the basic truths of life – that nobody is an island.”
—Knihovnice
"There's much wisdom here . . . An earnest meditation on the intrinsic value of human life."
—Los Angeles Times
“The Five People You Meet in Heaven confirms Mitch Albom as a writer of worship who can reach millions of readers for his courage to openly ask questions about our existence"
—El Mundo
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