The Five People You Meet in Heaven (The Five People You Meet in Heaven, #1)

by Mitch Albom

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A MAN named 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.

heat. Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else. Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come.

He watched Dominguez return to the sink. He thought for a moment. Then he took a small wad of bills from his pocket and removed the only twenties he had, two of them. He held them out.

“Get your wife something nice,” Eddie said.

EVERY LIFE HAS one true-love snapshot.

That was the snapshot. For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of Marguerite, Eddie would see that moment, her waving over her shoulder, her dark hair falling over one eye, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.

He used to think a lot about Marguerite. Not so much now. She was like a wound beneath an old bandage, and he had grown more used to the bandage.

NO STORY SITS by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

You cannot talk when you first arrive.” He smiled. “It helps you listen.”

In the early mornings, if I wore long shirts and draped my head in a towel, I could walk along this beach without scaring people. It may not sound like much, but for me, it was a freedom I had rarely known.”

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

“Fairness,” he said, “does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.”

“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.

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.

“I still don’t understand,” Eddie whispered. “What good came from your death?” “You lived,” the Blue Man answered. “But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger.” The Blue Man put his arms on Eddie’s shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation. “Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.”

“No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.

He learned that sometimes you are sitting next to a buddy in a dugout, whispering about how hungry you are, and the next instant there is a small whoosh and the buddy slumps over and his hunger is no longer an issue.

“The best we can do,” he was told. Was it? Who could say? All Eddie knew was that he’d awoken in a medical unit and his life was never the same. His running was over. His dancing was over. Worse, for some reason, the way he used to feel about things was over, too. He withdrew. Things seemed silly or pointless. War had crawled inside of Eddie, in his leg and in his soul. He learned many things as a soldier. He came home a different man.

“Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”

Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices.

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

ALL PARENTS DAMAGE their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

Through it all, despite it all, Eddie privately adored his old man, because sons will adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion. Before he can devote himself to God or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.

“Things that happen before you are born still affect you,” she said. “And people who come before your time affect you as well.

PARENTS RARELY LET go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them—a mother’s approval, a father’s nod—are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.

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.

His lips took a moment to part, and the sound from the back of his throat took a moment to rise, but they came together in the first letter of the only name that ever made him feel this way. He dropped to his knees. “Marguerite…” he whispered.

PEOPLE SAY THEY “find” love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love.

And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable. Once she’d gone, he’d let the days go stale. He put his heart to sleep.

And even though she was sitting in the seat next to him, Eddie felt her in everything, in the steering wheel, in the gas pedal, in the blinking of his eye, in the clearing of his throat. Every move he made was about hanging on to her.

With Marguerite, he wanted only time—more and more time—and he was granted it, nighttimes and daytimes and nighttimes again.

Eddie told her he had made things square, and her eyebrows lifted and her lips spread and Eddie felt an old, warm feeling he had missed for years, the simple act of making his wife happy.

At one point, he asked his wife if God knew he was here. She smiled and said, “Of course,” even when Eddie admitted that some of his life he’d spent hiding from God, and the rest of the time he thought he went unnoticed.

“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. “Life has to end,” she said. “Love doesn’t.”

He realized how much he missed the old man, how strange it was not having him at the pier, barking orders, watching everything like a mother hawk. They hadn’t even cleared out his locker. No one had the heart. They just left his stuff at the shop, where it was, as if he were coming back tomorrow.

Nothing important. No bank statements. No insurance policies. Just a black bow tie, a Chinese restaurant menu, an old deck of cards, a letter with an army medal, and a faded Polaroid of a man by a birthday cake, surrounded by children.

nothing important to them but to Eddie they were better then gold

The taxi takes him to the cemetery. He visits his mother’s grave and his brother’s grave and he stands by his father’s grave for only a few moments. As usual, he saves his wife’s for last. He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.

“Supposed to be there,” she said. “Where? At Ruby Pier?” She nodded. “Fixing rides? That was my existence?” He blew a deep breath. “Why?” She tilted her head, as if it were obvious. “Children,” she said. “You keep them safe. You make good for me.” She wiggled the dog against his shirt. “Is where you were supposed to be,” she said, and then she touched his shirt patch with a small laugh and added two words, “Eddie Main-ten-ance.”

“Push,” Tala said. He looked up. “Push?” “Push her legs. No pull. You push. Big thing fall. You keep her safe.” Eddie shut his eyes in denial. “But I felt her hands,” he said. “It’s the only thing I remember. I couldn’t have pushed her. I felt her hands.” Tala smiled and scooped up river water, then placed her small wet fingers in Eddie’s adult grip. He knew right away they had been there before. “Not her hands,” she said. “My hands. I bring you to heaven. Keep you safe.”

They were there, or would be there, because of the simple, mundane things Eddie had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day.

Nicky, the young man whose key had cut the cable, made a new key when he got home, then sold his car four months later. He returned often to Ruby Pier, where he bragged to his friends that his great-grandmother was the woman for whom it was named.

Lines formed at Ruby Pier—just as a line formed someplace else: five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered—why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.