A Fiction about Heaven which made Real Life more Understandable
What I loved about this novel by Mitch Albom…
“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time…”
What if death is not the end but the beginning of something new? A new tomorrow we never imagined could be.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is what that tomorrow looks like to its author, Mitch Albom.
The novel starts with the death of the protagonist, Eddie, and how he meets the five people in heaven who help him make sense of all yesterdays he lived back on earth.
Getting back to fiction after a long run of non-fiction reading — picking up this novel was the right call. It reaffirmed my belief that fiction is not escapism from reality but reality portrayed in a fictitious setting.
“Is there life after death?”
“Does heaven exist?”
“Do we take our memories to the afterlife?”
These questions have danced in the minds of many as timeless musings. The unknown always mystifies us. Mitch, however, finds heaven as the place to unravel the little mysteries of our lives that slipped past us when we were alive.
For him, those five people were woven into the tapestry of our lives. Some played significant roles, some simply existed, while others we never met, but the echoes of their stories affected ours.
The single underlying thread that continues throughout the narration is that everything is connected. Nothing happens without a reason, and there are no coincidences. We’re all a tiny part of the vast ocean of existing and not existing that conspires to bring us together in this life.
When Mitch writes:
“Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”
He reiterates that our life is never just ours but an overlap of the people who become a part of our existence and change our lives forever.
With a beautifully woven back and forth between Eddie’s days on earth and his time in heaven, Mitch elegantly conveys his thoughts on life, death, sacrifice, love, loss, and regret.
For most of our life, we blame ourselves or others, hold grudges, and grieve indefinitely. When what happens to us is merely a ripple effect of some actions that made up the past.
“NO STORY SITS by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners, and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”
Another wonderfully written line from the novel. We’re flowing in a continuum of stories running parallelly. A win for some is a loss for others. And heaven is the place that reveals all these parallels to us.
We just can’t know all the stories intertwined with ours, nor do we know if the heaven created by Mitch Albom exists for real. But reading the novel makes me think we can make life more memorable by grieving less and creating more space for happiness.
