The Five People You Meet in Heaven

by Mitch Albom

But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.

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.

But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.

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.”

But they all crossed your path before they died. And they altered it forever.”

He felt I had shamed him, and I suppose, in his world, I had.

“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.”

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.

One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.

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

I still don’t know why I’m here. I had a nothing life, see?

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

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

moment. He thought about the bitterness after his wounding, his anger at all he had given up. Then he thought of what the Captain had given up and he felt ashamed.

and

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.

a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.

You were just supposed to know it, that’s all.

All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again by the

denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done.

“Yeah, back,” Eddie said. “To my life. To that last day. Is there something I can do? Can I promise to be good? Can I promise to go to church all the time? Something?”

“You have peace,” the old woman said, “when you make it with yourself.”

He sat down in his life. And there he remained.

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.

“That’s because no one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it.

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.

The water of their love was hidden beneath the roots.

“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.”

That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.