Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven

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The Five People You Meet In Heaven While endings are the points at which current events are brought to a close, many endings can merely open one’s eyes to see something in a new light with his or her judgment unclouded by the previous events. Mitch Albom’s novel, The Five People You Meet In Heaven, illustrates this idea through the life and afterlife of a man named Eddie. The story opens with a tragic beginning when Eddie, an amusement park maintenance worker, is only minutes away from his imminent death. When he arrives in heaven after attempting to save a young girl at the park, he meets five people who teach him five lessons that help him learn not only the reason for his existence, but also the impact that he had on the lives of others.…show more content…
The desire to leave an impact on the world burdens individuals and leads them to regret the life that they carry out. Eddie is plagued by this mindset and mourns over his supposedly meaningless life spent fixing rides at Ruby Pier. When Eddie was young he never had the desire to work at Ruby Pier like his father but he returned after the war fueling regret, hatred, and anger about his life. His plans never worked out and he realized “that this was who he was and who he would always be” (Albom 5). His experience during the war left him depressed and confused after he believed to see a figure moving in a building he set on fire. The fifth person that Eddie meets in heaven, Tala, elucidates the impact of the fire and his overall purpose in the world. When he discovers that he actually killed Tala in the fire and as he reflects back on his life, he sobs, “I was sad because I didn’t do anything with my life. I accomplished nothing. I was lost. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there” (Albom 191). Tala reveals that despite his fatal act, fixing rides was his essential purpose in the world because he kept children safe. Eddie’s success in providing safety to children is his reconciliation for setting the fire that killed her. The morally driven remorse over his life and the guilt of his actions are purged through Tala’s lesson that every life has a
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