The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Book Review
Book by Mitch Albom

Mitch Albom is a good story-teller, whether the story is true, as in Tuesdays with Morrie, or fiction, as in this book. To quote him:

"This is a story about a man named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. 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."

So why did Mitch Albom write this little novel, and why have so many people read it that it is still #1 after being on The New York Times best-seller list for so many months? In my opinion, he has tapped into a deep-seated desire that many people have for meaning and purpose in their lives, a desire for their lives to make sense. Tuesdays with Morrie, for example is more about Mitch Albom than it is about Morrie. In my review of Tuesdays with Morrie, I quoted General Douglas MacArthur:

"Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste of adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years; he grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. Preoccupations, fears, doubts and despair are the dust before death. You will remain young as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of nature and of God. If one day you should become bitter, pessimistic and gnawed by despair, may God have mercy on your old man's soul."

Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson is a book about an old man (Morrie) who was young to his dying day because he remained faithful to his ideal (according to General MacArthur's definition), and a young man (Mitch Albom) who became old before he was forty years old, because he deserted his.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a book about an old man named Eddie who has long since deserted his ideal, because he feels trapped in a meaningless and monotonous life as a mechanic in a fun park. In the "Acknowledgements," Mitch Albom thanks his uncle "the real Eddie, who told me his stories long before I told my own." He uses the story of Eddie to illustrate his basic thesis that Heaven is where our deepest longings for meaning and purpose, for understanding, and making sense of our lives, will be realized. For example, the first person Eddie meets tells him:

"There are five people you meet in heaven . . . Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth. . . . That's what Heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays. . . . 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."

When Eddie asks if he is now going to have to pay for his sins in order for justice to be done, the first person he meets in Heaven replies:

"No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people here have one thing to teach you . . . that there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

In contrast to Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit, which can be summarized in the famous line "Hell is other people," this book suggest that Heaven is other people, specifically, five people who help you make sense of your life. For example:

"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect . . . that death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed. . . . Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."

This book reminded me of the error to which J.I. Packer alludes in his classic book Knowing God. According to Packer, many people imagine that the wisdom of God is like being invited up into the control tower at a central railroad station where one can see an overview of the entire rail system and "be able to look at the whole situation through the eyes of the men who control it." Packer continues:

"Now the mistake that is commonly made is to suppose that this is an illustration of what God does when He bestows wisdom; to suppose, in other words, that the gift of wisdom consists in a deepened insight into the providential meaning and purpose of events going on around us, and ability to see why God has done what He has done in a particular case, and what He is going to do next."

That raises one interesting aspect of this book about Heaven: God never appears in the narrative. Allusions are made to Him, and one suspects that Albom is writing of himself when Eddie asks his wife if God knows that he is in Heaven now:

"At one point, he asked his wife if God knew he was here. She smiled and said 'Of course,' even when Eddie admitted that some of his life he'd spent hiding from God, and the rest of the time he thought he went unnoticed."

Some of the more moving passages of this book are those that describe the relationship of Eddie with his father. Mitch Albom has captured much of the essence of the father-son relationship, the fact that they adore one another, but it is often only when sons are small boys that they are able to demonstrate their affection for their fathers without embarrassment. In addition, parents often damage their children, often inadvertently, sometimes with the best of motives, and sometimes out of selfishness. He 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 children completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair. . . . The damage done by Eddie's father was at the beginning, the damage of neglect . . . Eddie's mother handed out the tenderness, his father was there for the discipline."

Later, "The hands on Eddie's childhood glass then were hard and calloused and red with anger, and he went through his younger years whacked, lashed and beaten . . . the damage of violence."

Nevertheless, Eddie adored his father and longed for his approval. This is why he worked long days helping his father as a maintenance mechanic at Ruby's Pier. Ironically, his father loved Eddie and was very proud of his work ethic, but he could never bring himself to tell Eddie. Albom writes:

"Through it all, despite it all, Eddie privately adored his old man, because sons will adore their fathers through even the worst behavior. It is how they learn devotion. Before he can devote himself to God, or a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond expectation."

Finally, they stopped talking almost totally, relying on body language and gestures to communicate what they could not put into words:

"Unbeknownst to him, he had begun the ritual of semaphore with his father, forsaking words or physical affection. It was all to be done internally. You were just supposed to know it, that's all. Denial of affection. The damage done . . . And then one night, they stopped speaking altogether."

When Eddie returned from World War II, the gap between his father and himself widened even further, in part because his father did not understand what the war had done to Eddie. When Eddie finally defended himself from his father's drunken violence by parrying his father's blows, his father refused to ever speak to him again:

"He never spoke to his son again. This was the final handprint on Eddie's glass. Silence. It haunted their remaining years." All because "That boy raised a hand to me."

During his father's illness, which eventually led to his death, Eddie left his job as a taxi driver to fill in for his father at the Pier to hold on to his job. After his death, he and his wife moved in with his mother to take care of her, and Eddie continued to work as a maintenance mechanic at the Pier, something he had sworn he would never do. As a result, he spent the rest of his life in bitter resignation. Albom writes:

"Eddie never said this-not to his wife, not to his mother, not to anyone-but he cursed his father for dying and for trapping him in the very life he had been trying to escape, a life that, as he heard the old man laughing down from the grave, apparently now was good enough for him."

One of the things Eddie learns in Heaven is to let go of his anger and bitterness. For one thing, as one of the five people he meets tells him: "Your father is not the reason you never left the pier." But more importantly, he learns that bitterness is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person will die. As the same person tells him:

"Learn this from me. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."

This is a helpful book for those who want to better understand their contemporaries and their deepest longings. As was previously mentioned, the overwhelming popularity of this book suggests that Mitch Albom has tapped into the deep desire we all have for meaning and purpose, and especially to understand the significance of the seemingly random things that happen to us. This helps explain the widespread popularity of another book on The New York Times best-seller list, The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold 22 million copies. One wonders why such a book, which was intended for evangelical Christians, has met with such wide-spread acceptance. I have a hunch that it is the word "purpose" in the title. People long for a purpose-driven life rather than the seemingly chaotic and random ones they have. The popularity of The Five People You Meet in Heaven supports this thesis.

Finally, this book seems to be a continuation of the search for meaning and purpose that Mitch Albom began in Tuesdays with Morrie. As I mentioned before, I thought that Tuesdays with Morrie was more about Mitch Albom and the fact that he had deserted his ideal than it was about Morrie. There are indications that he is continuing that search. For example, writing of a lawyer who comes to Eddie's apartment after his death to set Eddie's affairs in order, he writes:

"Then as often happened with these visits, he silently congratulated himself on his own portfolio of stocks, bonds and a vested retirement plan. It sure beat ending up like this poor slob, with nothing to show but a tidy kitchen."

This is a richly ironic statement, it seems to me. Albom seems to be echoing the parable of the rich fool, because the lawyer misses the point entirely. The day is coming when it won't matter whether you have a "portfolio of stocks, bonds and a vested retirement plan" or "nothing to show but a tidy kitchen." Death is the great equalizer. As someone said in answer to the question of how much the wealthy man left: "He left it all."

Albom, Mitch: The Five People You Meet in Heaven; Hyperion; New York; 2003 ISBN 0-7868-6871-6