Mitch Albom’s, The Five People You Meet in Heaven Essay -- The Five Pe

In Mitch Albom’s, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, the author centers the story around Eddie’s life, beginning with his death. â€Å"It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time† (1, paragraph 1). The most important thing in this story that we must all understand is that although we may not know it, somehow our lives all have a common intersection. â€Å"No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river (16, paragraph 8). Eddie’s life ends tragically at Ruby Pier, the amusement park, where he has felt trapped for so many, long years, with what he thinks of as â€Å"a meaningless life†. When Eddie opens his eyes, he thinks that he is in heaven. He sees the sky changing many, beautiful colors as he is floating through the air. Eddie eventually lands in the place that he has come to think of as his own hell, Ruby Pier. He questions why he has been sent back here. He wonders if he had really been so bad of a person on earth that God would send him here to live for eternity. Once Eddie meets the side show â€Å"freak†, The Blue Man, he begins to understand why he has come here again. The Blue Man explains that Eddie will meet five people in heaven that will explain the meaning of his life. The Blue Man tells Eddie the story of a young boy, and how that young boy darted out into the road in front of a man, causing him to have a heart attack and crash. He realizes that the man was The Blue Man and the boy had been himself. The Blue Man tells Eddie that he must understand â€Å"That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than... ... to all the children that entered Ruby Pier. They all knew that they would be safe because they had someone watching over them, like an angel. Eddie had been the children’s angel. Everyone Eddie met in heaven taught him something about his life. They were all connected to him in different ways, whether it was someone close to him once, or a complete stranger. Somehow, all of their lives had crossed Eddie’s and helped make him the person that he had become. When you think about this lesson, you truly understand. One decision causes an effect, maybe on your life or maybe on someone else’s life. That effect will cause something else. It’s what I think of as a ripple effect. Everything happens for a reason, and all of the events that lead up to our â€Å"now† makes us who we are. Works Cited Albom, Mitch. The Five People You Meet in Heaven. New York: Hyperion. 2003.