The five people you meet in Heaven

As you all very well know, I've been trying to read through a list of books that have long been recommended to me by both friends and family (and BBC) as books you "have to read before you die". There are many great titles in that list, but only a few jewels that I would keep reading again and again. One of these jewels is "The five people you meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom.

The book starts with the end. A strange place to start a story, perhaps, but as Albom says "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time." The story tells us about Eddie - an old maintenance worker at Ruby Pier, an amusement park near the ocean, who dies on his eighty-third birthday while trying to save a young girl from a falling cart. Eddie awakens in the afterlife remembering nothing from his last seconds on Earth except that he felt two small hands in is. He has no idea whether he managed to save the girl or not and thoughts of whether his life was worth anything in the end torment him throughout the whole story. He soon realizes that Heaven is not at all like the Eden he had imagined it to be, but rather a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. Five people who's path you changed forever, or who might have changed yours likewise. Strangers and loved ones who wait for you in their own version of Heaven to tell you their story and give you a lesson to learn.

Throughout the book Eddie starts understanding what his life meant to those around him. Seeing more than one incident from another point of view helps him accept the things he could not come to terms with before and see things, and people, in a different light. In the end he realizes that the ordinary life he thought he had settled for was the one he was meant to lead all along.

I believe this book is one of the most powerful stories I have ever read. An ordinary man leading an ordinary life that touched so many others whom he never knew. It' s a story that inspires, a story that comforts and a one that stays with you for the rest of your life. I highly recommend reading this book. It's good one for the soul.