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.
• They trusted him. They drew in like cold hands to a fire.
• 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.
• This was who he was and who he would always be.
• Every life has one true-love snapshot.
• He was so nervous he felt as if his tongue were glued to his teeth.
• But as she walked away, she turned and waved.
• For the rest of his life, Eddie would see that moment, her waving over her shoulders, her dark hair falling over one eye, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.
• 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.
• He squeezed his eyes tightly, to bring the memory closer.
• How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?
• "It's as if he knew he was going to die…"
• As far as he could tell, when your time came, it came, and that was that.
• In those final moments, Eddie seemed to hear the whole world: Distant screaming, waves, music, a rush of wind, a low, loud, ugly sound that he realized was his own voice blasting through his chest.

• Every hurt he'd ever suffered, every ache he'd ever endured - it was all as gone as an expired breath. He could not feel agony. He could not feel sadness.
• Then he was under water. Then everything was silent.
• She will hold his hand and tell him God is proud of him for being a good boy on his birthday, and that will make the world feel right-side up again.

• Aside from his lack of voice, he felt incredible.
• He lowered his chin and held his arms out like a glider, and every few steps he would jump, the way children do, hoping running will turn into flying.
• But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.

• How long have I been dead? "A minute. An hour. A thousand years."
• The ocean was in front of them. The sky was the color of lemons.
• "Well. 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."
• "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."
• But scenery without solace is meaningless.
• "This is the greatest gift God can give you: To understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for."
• "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."
• "He felt I had shamed him, and I suppose, in his world, I had. But fathers can ruin their sons, and I was, in a fashion, ruined after that."
• He saw the dirty sheets, then glared at me with eyes that I will never forget, as if he wished he would snap the cord of life between us.
• I had never been to any of these places, of course, but it was pleasant to be considered exotic, if only on a painted sign.
• When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.
• It may not sound like much, but for me, it was a freedom I had rarely known.
• Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily, and the other ends badly.
• Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen.

• "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 does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."
• 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."
• One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
• "Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."
• "No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

• Fear had found him, even in heaven.
• He guessed it was the right lift but the wrong pair of arms.
• Maybe someone would miss him, too.
• "It's the thinking that gets you killed."
• The Captain held up his cigarette. He smiled as if to say, "Can you believe you get to smoke up here?"
• As always, with Marguerite, Eddie mostly wants to freeze time.
• He loves her more in this moment than he thought he ever could ever love anyone.
• "Don't get killed, OK?" she says.
• "No one gets left behind, remember?" the Captain said.

• "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning."
• "That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterday's."
• Sacrifices is 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."

• Why would heaven make you relive your own decay?
• He looks at these faces and he is consumed by a desire to run away.
• Eddie tightens every muscle in his body and attempts, by sheer will, to force the tears back into their ducts.
• 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.
• Why are they gone and I'm still here?
• He felt more alone than ever.
• The worst part is not the sleeplessness. The worst part is the general darkness the dream leaves over him, a gray film that clouds the day. Even his happy moments feel encased, like holes jabbed in a hard sheet of ice.
• How can he explain such sadness when she is supposed to make him happy? The truth is he cannot explain it himself. All he knows is that something stepped in front of him, blocking his way, until in time he gave up on things.
• Eddie feels the need to inhale, as if undeserving of such a moment. He fights the darkness within him, "Leave me alone," he tells it. "Let me feel this the way I should feel it."
• "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."
• 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.

• But things are not always what they seem.
• At that moment, he was lost, adrift, and what he did was an act of loneliness and desperation. He acted on impulse. A bad impulse.
• Better to be loyal to one another.
• Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge. His thoughts still haunted him.
• Which was worse than left unexplained: A life, or a death?
• Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is 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. 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."
• But he didn't. Eddie never said anything he felt that deeply.
• "I will," Eddie says, but he is looking at his wife.
• 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.
• "When the groom lifts the veil, when the bride accepts the ring, the possibilities you see in their eyes, it's the same around the world. They truly believe their love and their marriage is going to break all the records."
• He wanted to ask her about every little thing and every big thing, too. He felt a churning inside him, a stop-start anxiety. He had no idea where to begin.
• She nodded and smiled, a gentle smile, and at the sight of it, his eyes began to moisten and a wave of sadness washed over him and suddenly, just like that, none of this mattered, nothing about his death or the park or the crowd he had yelled at to "Get back!" Why was he talking about this? What was he doing? Was he really with her? Like a hidden grieving that rises to grab the heart, his soul was ambushed with old emotions, and his lips began to tremble and he was swept into the current of all that he had lost.
• He dropped his head into his hands and he said it anyhow, he said what everyone says. "I missed you so much."
• 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 waters of their love fell again from above and soaked them as surely as the sea that gathered at their feet.
• On earth, Marguerite said, when you fell asleep, you sometimes dreamed your heaven and those dreams helped to form it. But there was no reason for such dreams now.

• "This is the moment you think about what you're doing. Who you're choosing. Who you will love. If it's right, Eddie, this can be such a wonderful moment."
• "You felt that it was snatched away, that I left you too soon."
• There was a reason to it all.
• "You were the best person any of us knew, and you died and you lost everything. And I lost everything. I lost the only woman I ever loved."
• "I was right here. And you loved me anyway."
• "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."
• "I never wanted anyone else" "I know"
• "I was still in love with you" "I know. I felt it" "Here?" "Even here. That's how strong lost love can be."
• She smiled and he smiled, and she was to him, as beautiful as ever, and he closed his eyes and said for the first time what he'd been feeling from the moment he saw her again: "I don't want to go on. I want to stay here."
• When he opened his eyes, his arms still held her shape, but she was gone, and so was everything else.

• Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken.
• He wanted her desperately, one more minute, half a minute, five more seconds, but there was no way to reach or call or wave or even look at her picture. He felt as if he'd tumbled down steps and was crumpled at the bottom. His soul was vacant. He had no impulse. He hung limp and lifeless in the void, as if on a hook, as if all the fluids had been gored out of him. He might have hung there a day or a month. It might have been a century.
• It is never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary.
• 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.

• "I was sad because I didn't do anything with my life. I was nothing. I accomplished nothing. I was lost. I felt like I wasn't supposed to be there."
• His grip was still entwined with Tala's, but he felt his body being washed from his soul, meat from the bone, and with it went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory.
• He reached for her and he saw her smile and the voices melded into a single word from God: Home.

• 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.