The Five People You Meet In Heaven :: essays research papers

Eddie is a brood war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless aliveness of fixing rides at a seaside amusement car park. As the park has changed over the years -- from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline Plunge -- so, excessively, has Eddie changed, from optimistic jejuneness to embittered old age. His days ar a dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret. Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to save a shortsighted girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two wasted hands in his -- and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, but a take aim where five muckle who were in it explain your earthly life to you. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet for each one of them changed your path forever. One by one, Eddies five people illuminate the undetected connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie despe rately seeks redemption in the still-unknown last act of his life Was it a heroic success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most unlikely of sources, is as inspirational as a glimpse of heaven itself.These five meetings -- some of which are with people who are strangers to Eddie, others with people he knows intimately -- take this ill-natured but gentle man through the different stages of his life, and through each new person, some hidden truth is revealed. As Albom unfolds Eddies story, he step by step sheds light on the web of connections between each individual and a world of strangers, so that life is revealed not as a artless story of what we have achieved but as a vast network, too large for us to perceive clearly from the inside.