"The Five People You Meet in Heaven"
Mitch Albom
Hyperion, $19.95
I think I was slightly put off by the title of this book when I first picked it up, thinking it was going to be about God and heaven and Christianity. But it is far from it.
"The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is Mitch Albom's interpretation of what happens when you die — one must meet five people before settling for eternity in the heaven of their choosing.
Eddie is the head of maintenance at Ruby Pier, "an amusement park by a great gray ocean" (1). Eddie dies, then goes to heaven, where he meets five people. Each person is someone who has died before he has, someone whose life had an effect on Eddie, someone who has a lesson to teach Eddie.
The time Eddie spends meeting the five people settles the discrepancies from his own life. He learns the whys and hows of the incidents that had bothered him the most in his life, and he reignited the love that had grown cold in his heart. When Eddie gets to his heaven, he is finally happy, finally satisfied with the previous 83 years, for which he had previously believed himself to be a failure.
Albom's idea of heaven is comforting, believing that you are able to relieve the best part of your life for eternity in heaven. However, I have issue with the five people you must meet in their own heavens before moving on to your own heaven. Albom's idea of heaven is structured so that you will never meet someone who is still alive, and there is no guarantee they will be meeting you when they die. True, if they were important to you, they will be part of your heaven, but one is locked into only learning about the effect of those who have died before.
At the root of Albom's idea is that we are all connected. As Eddie learns from the first person he meets in heaven,
"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." (48)And from the second person he meets in heaven,
"That's the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it to someone else." (94)And from Eddie's start of eternity in heaven,
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 effects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one. (196)
Albom constructs the six degrees of separation, including a twist in the epilogue that further relates the characters.
The author illustrates maturity and intelligence through the lessons each of the five teaches Eddie. And his writing is good, linking the lessons to real-life experiences to contextualize them and truly make them real. His storytelling is smooth, so the book is an easy, quick read. "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is a comforting look at the importance of every individual, because every individual has an effect on the world.
