More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Blue Man lifted his chin.
The first person Eddie meets in heaven.
“THERE ARE FIVE people you meet in heaven,” the Blue Man suddenly said. “Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”
“I was christened Joseph Corvelzchik, the son of a tailor in a small Polish village.
The name & background of "The Blue Man."
I went to a chemist, seeking something for my nerves. He gave me a bottle of silver nitrate and told me to mix it with water and take it every night.
How the blue man became blue (his skin).
“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.
“You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. 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.”
“No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
The Captain was Eddie’s commanding officer.
The second person Eddie meets in Heaven (they served together in the war).
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.
“That’s the thing. 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.
“I,” she said, “am Ruby.”
The third person Eddie meets in Heaven (Ruby).
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.
“Marguerite…” he whispered.
The fourth person Eddie neets in Heaven (his wife).
“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.”
