Book: The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom

 

This book is sheer magic in content and style. The first chapter of the book is titled "The End" and the first sentence of the book is "This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might have seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time"

And the author grips us right there. Right through the story and till the end. The impact  doesn't end when the story ends. That talks volumes about the book.

"This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for." That's the gift that Eddie, a 86 year old war veteran and maintenance man gets which liberates him from his loneliness, guilts, regrets and resentments. He also learns to forgive.

Eddie and the five people who show him the meaning of his life continue to haunt us for a long time. A wonderful story of Eddie that  almost unfolds backwards. Chapters about his birthdays act as touch points, connecting the present, the past and the future.

Eddie leads a seemingly wasted life and as we go along his life, we feel sorry for him. His ambitions and optimism get shattered when he is forced by circumstances to take up maintenance of the park, his father's job and becomes Eddie, Maintenance. The war leaves him partially crippled that ravages him physically. His resentment against his father and his interpretation of events leave him bitter.

When he dies and goes to heaven, he meets five important people of his life. He learns important lessons which could be lessons for anyone. What we think is a meaningless life of fixing rides at a seaside amusement park, gets a totally different meaning when we, along with Eddie rediscover the meaning from a different perspective. Life is actually good that can only be spoilt only by our interpretations. We discover that even a life full of dull routine of work, loneliness, and regret has some meaning for someone, in his case the hundreds of innocent children who enjoy the rides safely because of his work.

His shock of finding that the heaven resembles the place where he lived is real. He meets five people, one by one. Each of them reveal a side of his life that he was not aware earlier. As he sees the new angle, he picks up a new meaning.

The author's brilliance shines throughout the book. Some of the quotes about death, life, relationships and other topics are:

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

"Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.

"Holding anger is a poison...It eats you from inside...We think that by hating someone we hurt them...But hatred is a curved blade...and the harm we do to others...we also do to ourselves."

"Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

"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 childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."

"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we're alone."

"Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."

"You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself."

"Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive."

"Heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners."

"People say they 'find' love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And [he] found a certain love with [her], a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable."

The book ends with "Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."  

Absolutely true. We are all full of stories which touch each other 'like pebbles in the river'

Book: For One More Day - Mitch Albom

"Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? What if you got it back?" 

The book in a single line would be - A suicidal former baseball player is granted one more day with his dead mother.


It's a gripping story of a shattered family that's superbly written. Mingled with moments that wring the heart, it is in a fluid style where a broken Charles 'Chick' Benetto narrates the story of his life. 


The book is about Chick's failure to build a a professional career and his even more serious failure with his family, job and finance. It's about his failure to discern what is right and what is wrong, failure in realising the most important people & things of his life. It's about his blind faith in his father that leads him to do so many irresponsible things like dropping out of college and lie to his mother. One day he leaves home for a game, he leaves her birthday party, without declaring the real reason of course...he shuts the car door as his mother speaks to him...that's the last he sees her alive. She dies as timely medical help is not available. And our Benetto lives in regret of all those times he didn't stand up for his mother. 



The book starts with a shocking question about why he wanted to commit suicide. As he takes us along his life one cannot help but feel sorry for him. One can actually empathise with the kid for the shallow ambitions without any preparation.


As a father, as a husband, as an individual he manages to become a pathetic loser in all of these aspects. He plans his suicide and is not able to go about it the way he wanted. He meets with a road accident from where the story leads us to his meeting with his mother. And then he returns, loaded with the lessons from his mother that he got during the one day that he spends with her in his town. 

The moments they spend together is very insightful and touching. This results in patching up the broken bond between the two. Their discussion about lives of different people they visit, the final moments of people known to them and finally their discussion about the one woman who would have drawn the utmost hatred....an amazing trip about people and relationships.



The mother. She towers above all the chaos. Incidents of times when the mother stood up for him...and times when he didn't stand up for her  that dot the book are amazing. We take our parents for granted. Particularly the mother. But she comes out of it all much stronger than anyone else in this book. And gives him one more day in his life to realise what he had done with his life. And then, magically, he gets to live on...to correct his mistakes and earn back the faith and trust of his daughter. The revelation of the listener's identity in the end is a pleasant surprise and proves that he actually succeeds in getting his daughter back.



The transformation he undergoes after meeting his mother is nicely captured. After all, not every one gets to learn from one's mother after her death. It's one thing to remember what she stood for but it is another to live one full day again with her to learn from her and get a lot of issues clarified in person. The plot develops in a captivating way, capturing the different aspects of relationships beautifully.

A wonderful lesson that ends with a longing statement  "I would like to make things right again with those I love". 

Of course yes, we would all love to do just that, but have never found the time to do so.