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

Eddie is a grizzled war veteran who feels trapped in a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside merriment park. As the park has changed over the years -- from the Loop-the-Loop to the Pipeline dunk -- so, too, has Eddie changed, from optimistic youth to embittered old age. His days are a fatigue routine of work, loneliness, and regret. Then, on his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies in a tragic accident, trying to alleviate a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his -- and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden, and a place where five dollar bill population who were in it explain your temporal life to you. These people may have been loved ones or remote strangers. Yet distributively of them changed your path forever. One by one, Eddies five people illuminate the unseen connections of his earthly life. As the story builds to its stunning conclusion, Eddie urgently seeks r edemption in the still-unknown last act of his life Was it a lofty success or a devastating failure? The answer, which comes from the most improbable 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 virtually -- take this gruff but gentle man through the antithetic stages of his life, and through each new person, some hidden truth is revealed. As Albom unfolds Eddies story, he gradually sheds light on the web of connections between each individual and a world of strangers, so that life is revealed not as a straightforward story of what we have achieved but as a vast network, too large for us to perceive clearly from the inside.