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

by Mitch Albom

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.

EVERY LIFE HAS one true-love snapshot.

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

HOW DO PEOPLE choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?

when your time came, it came, and that was that. You might say something smart on your way out, but you might just as easily say something stupid.

In the stories about life after death, the soul often floats above the good-bye moment, hovering over police cars at highway accidents, or clinging like a spider to hospital-room ceilings. These are people who receive a second chance, who somehow, for some reason, resume their place in the world.

People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps. This, for me, is the second. And for you, the first.”

“Your voice will come. We all go through the same thing. You cannot talk when you first arrive.”

“THERE ARE FIVE people you meet in heaven,”

“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...

“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. “This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. ...

“I am your first person, Edward. When I died, my life was illuminated by five others, and then I came here to wait for you, to stand in your line, to tell you my story, which becomes part of yours. There will be others for you, too. Some you knew, maybe some you didn’t. But they all crossed your path before they died. And they altered it forever.”

TAKE ONE STORY, viewed from two different angles.

“PLEASE, MISTER…” EDDIE PLEADED. “I DIDN’T know. Believe me… God help me, I didn’t know.” The Blue Man nodded. “You couldn’t know. You were too young.” Eddie stepped back. He squared his body as if bracing for a fight. “But now I gotta pay,” he said. “To pay?” “For my sin. That’s why I’m here, right? Justice?” The Blue Man smiled. “No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you.”

“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.”

“My funeral,” the Blue Man said. “Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should? “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. “It is why we are drawn to babies…” He turned to the mourners. “And to funerals.”

“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.”

“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.”

“I am leaving,” the Blue Man whispered in his ear. “This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet.” “Wait,” Eddie said, pulling back. “Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?” The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. “Then my death was a waste, just like my life.” “No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”

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.

“War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it, you hear? No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don’t think about who you’re shootin’ or killin’ or why, y’hear me? You want to come home again, you just fire, you don’t think.”

“It’s the thinking that gets you killed.”

He pulled the vines apart and saw the rifle and helmet still stuck in the ground. He remembered why soldiers did this: It marked the graves of their dead.

A FREED SOLDIER is often furious. The days and nights he lost, the torture and humiliation he suffered—it all demands a fierce revenge, a balancing of the accounts.

“For me, that little idea was what I told you guys every day. No one gets left behind.”

“Time,” the Captain said, “is not what you think.” He sat down next to Eddie. “Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”

“SACRIFICE,” THE CAPTAIN said. “You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost.

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.

“One day,”

“we will all be together in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“Things that happen before you are born still affect you,” she said. “And people who come before your time affect you as well. “We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time—we often think they began with our arrival. That’s not true.”

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.

“People don’t die because of loyalty.”

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. “Forgive, Edward. Forgive. Do you remember the lightness you felt when you first arrived in heaven?”

“That’s because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it.”

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.

LOVE, LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.

“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.”