Paradise in the imagination
Tulip Chowdhury is impressed by an unusual story
14 October 2011, 18:00 PM
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Mitch Albom
Hyperion, New YorkEighty-three-year old Eddie is in the last phase of his life. He has been working on the maintenance of the Ruby Pier, an amusement park, for as long as he can remember. When he looks for broken boards, loose bolts, worn out steel all of sudden he stops and seems to listen.
After all these years he could hear trouble, he says, in the spits, stutter and thumping of the equipment. But on this particular, eighty-third birthday Eddie dies tragically as he falls from a cart while trying to save a little girl. With his last breath he feels two small hands in his and then nothing.
The story of Eddie begins backwards, from the ending as he wakes up in heaven. He learns that heaven does not come at the end of life but in fact is another beginning where your life on earth is explained by five people who are already there. Eddie learns that all endings are also beginnings, we just don't know it at that time. Life's values and lessons are explained to him and he realizes that life is just opening up with all its meanings for him after it is over in reality.
The first person to visit Eddie is the Blue Man. Eddie is back at the pier and it is his childhood again. The Blue Man says that the feeling is there because he had known the Blue Man when he was a child. The Blue Man tells him that the five people Eddie meets in heaven had come into his life for a reason. He further says that people do not come to heaven to laze about in gardens and walk by peaceful rivers. They come to have life explained to them, they come to reach solace in their life. Eddie learns that each of the five people he will meet will give him lessons on life. Eddie visits different life scenarios and has the Blue Man explain different situations. The Blue Man says that he died when he was trying to save Eddie from hitting him with his car. And when Eddie says that life is not fair the Blue Man replies,
"Fairness does not govern life or death. If it did no good person would ever die young."
He also says that birth and death intersect people, that people had come to his funeral even though they did not know him because the human spirit knows that all lives intersect. That death just doesn't take someone, it misses someone else. And in the small distance between being taken and being missed lives are changed. Eddie learns about life and wishes that The Blue Man would stay with him. But the Blue Man is gone and Eddie is left to reflect on all the secrets opened up to him.
Eddie feels his feet touch the ground and is back on earth. He is surrounded by black rubble and he can hear explosions and bomb blasts. He is running, running with the measured steps of a soldier. Ah, yes, he is in the battlefield, he is in his life as a soldier with his captain. They had served together in the Philippines. In the war they were taken captives and tortured for days. Then one day they had been able to smite their enemies and come out of their prison. On their way out they had burned down their prison. Eddie had a vision of a child being burnt in the burning house. He had gone back and when he was trying to get inside the burning house he was shot on his leg. Ever since that bullet shot he had not been able use his right leg properly.
Now that Eddie meets the Captain in heaven he is told that it was the Captain who had shot him in the leg. The Captain admits that he had shot Eddie on his leg to save his life. . All these years Eddie had cursed the person who had made him lame. Now he finds that the Captain had saved his life by shooting on this leg for he would not have come out alive from that raging inferno. Eddie is at loss for words when he further learns that the Captain had died on that day evidently after saving Eddie.
All his life Eddie had been in awe of his father. His mother had been the one to smother them with love while his father had been the one with the rod. Of parents Albom writes, " All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhood completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."
The damage done by Eddie's father was the damage of neglect. On Saturdays his father would take him to the amusement park. Eddie would have visions of cotton candy and rides. But his father would leave him in the care of the animal keeper or other man and come back drunk. When Eddie has a vision of his father and wants to call out a voice calls out, and he finds his third person in heaven. It is Ruby, wife of the owner of Ruby Pier, the amusement park. Ruby shows him how kind his father had been to others in his life. Though he had been abusive at home he had lived all his life helping and saving the life of man who had degraded his wife. Eddie learns of various incidents that shows how generous and brave his father had been. It is Ruby who changes Eddie's long standing opinion of his father and he finds solace in his heart. Ruby tells him that things happen like a chain. If Eddie's father had not worked at Ruby Pier she would not have come to tell Eddie about him. She says,
Then Eddie enters a world of wedding ceremonies. He goes through African, Lebanese and other counties' weddings. And at the end he finds his own bride, he finds his beloved wife Marguerite. She is the fourth person he meets in heaven. Marguerite tells him she too had five people explain her life to her after she came to heaven. Marguerite is in her youth, just like the days they had been married. Eddie feels the bliss of love, feels the happiness of being in love and be loved back. They never had children but their love thrived all tests of life. Marguerite tells him that she is utterly happy here in the heaven and that she knows his love is complete for her. Love, she says goes beyond the world of the living and that is why even in heaven they still love each other completely. Eddie understands that love, like rain can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes under angry heat of life love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.
Marguerite died just when she was 47. She told Eddie that he must have felt his love was snatched away from him. Lost love, she says is just another form of love. Life comes to an end, she says, but love doesn't. When Eddie is holding her with the complete knowledge of their love, feels that life has been wonderful after all ,Marguerite vanishes.
Eddie finally finds peace with his life upon the earth. His work at the pier seemed to have been worth all the time and efforts he had given there. They story in The Five People You Meet In Heaven builds up to its climax very gradually. There is a vivid description of the places and people Eddie meets in heaven. The plot is mind blowing and it stretches the imagination of the reader. The life in heaven holds a intriguing questions for us all and this book seems to pave away to a deeper layer. The characters portrayed indeed seem to be out of the world. The reader has a sensation as if one is reaching out to those people who are no longer in the world. The book is a real mind stretcher!
Tulip Chowdhury writes fiction and is a teacher.
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