The five people you meet in heaven ( Archived) (34)

On his eighty-third birthday, Eddie, a lonely war veteran, dies in a tragic accident trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his – and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden but a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.

Thus reads the resume on the back of the book with the same title as this thread.
Mitch Albom be the author.

It is a book I have already recommended to someone here, soon to get it, and it is one I recommend to you all, but with Mitch Albom, one should start with his Tuesdays with Morrie, a story of a young man learning one grand lesson, the last one offered by an old dying mentor of his, a scrip that will have you put the book down once the last page has been passed, with a great feeling pleasing your heart.

Get the books if you don’t have them already. Do yourself that favor. It will not take you more than a day or two to read each, but the tales will stay with your forever, be thou man or woman,.

It’s an intriguing idea, the initial referred to.
What five people would one meet in heaven, if that was what a heaven defined?

I’m still young, there are many more witnessing of melting snows to be chased off by the arrival of springs ahead of me, many more passing of season to walk through, I do hope.
I’m sure I have a few persons yet to meet who will set permanent handprints in my private, personal, walk of fabulously inspiring names on a pavement of fame.

Thinking about it, now, today, can you come up with someone you think would be the one to meet you in heaven?

Remember now, it must not be someone very close. It must not be a mother or a father, say, but it can be, if it must. The key idea is that it will be someone who makes you understand your earthly life, not necessarily someone you, yourself want to spend time with more than any other. The key is that it will be people bound to make you learn more about bits that you didn’t learn while down here, and then, when up there, your being will be finally completed and at nirvana-like rest by learning them bits through them.

Us most fortunate, our parents did, they still do their best to explain the earthly life, here on earth, hence why my parents wouldn’t be any of the five, other are not as fortunate as to have parents walk them through this life terrestrial in such a splendid fashion.

I. My maternal grandfather was a drunk. I remember him an asbestos-like cough, barely able to sit in a summer chair under the absence of a single hint of a wind. Frail, a face tormented and wrinkled by harsh times which had etched permanent strain, carved passages of pain over his pores, with those glassy eyes which people fighting off the reaper man, half absent-mindedly, look through.

My mother grew up in a home of 8 children, in a one room building. Her father, my grandfather, what money he would earn, he would drink most of it on the very payday, then he would come home, crying, ashamed, begging forgiveness, and they would forgive, both his children, among them my mother, as would her mother, my grandmother.

When the Second World War started, years before my grandfather married his only wife to be and built the family I gave you a glance of above, they came to collect my grandfather’s brother, who lived next door. Recruiting whoever they pleased. Croats that were being picked to serve in an army they did not want to serve. My grandfather’s brother, let’s now call him great uncle, because I believe that is the English word for such family, he had recently married, and was expecting a firstborn. As they were to collect him, my grandfather asked if he could not picked for the mission instead, and they leave his brother be. They obliged.

So, my grandfather takes to war, lives to see what memories later makes a grown man cry, and he always fails to express in words.

Visiting, traveling down there, I would often sit with him, my grandfather, and he would tell stories. But I came late. He died while I was still in my early teens. The amount of wisdom he did manage to share during that short time, I still allow myself to be guided by some of it, and believe he could offer much more, if I entered a heaven and he was there waiting for me.

I don’t know what goes through the mind of a man who’s lived to see men next to him be shot, blown up, or overrun by heavy, armored vehicles, and I can’t really find a way to in some way not understand a man taking to drinking after experiencing such unimaginable views, although I don’t fully condone it. Regardless, I do believe that such a man, a man of his inner chaotic state, who has entered heaven - let us imagine - and no longer suffers the turmoil of the soul, he will have something very valuable to say, finally, fully able to share it, completely, and it will be astonishingly wise, I dare wager.

From what I gather having read the book, you couldn't possibly know who it is you would meet in Heaven. It would be someone whose life you have touched or someone who has touched your life in a seemingly small way-but have made a difference.

It is a beautiful book and a short read. I recommend it to people as well. What I took away from the book, is that we are all intertwined and we effect each other's life. The impact is unknown, except for maybe in the unconscious.

The book really made me think I was nothing like I thought it would be.

There's a movie as well. They did a fair job at it, but, of course, as most, the book is far better---because you use the tools you have in your mind to process it, and see it in your own way. That is always a special thing.

Very good thread and a good recommendation.

some might see heaven as a place to visit dear old granny but i'll not be having any of that thank you. when I get to heaven i'm going to get good and drunk and have a riot with steinbeck, picasso, orwell,richard pryor, william burroughs,bill hicks, edward hopper and hunter s thompson. then i'm gonna get naked and chase audrey hepburn, elizabeth taylor, brigitte bardot and beatrice dalle around.

III. My teacher of Swedish language in upper secondary school, during the very same period as in #II above, an amazing man who allowed a bit of his time, beyond common time, because he said that he saw something in me that would become a thing of value come the future.

To nudge the young man which I was at the time in the right direction, make this person open his eyes a wee bit, get a glimpse of what words can evoke, whet they can do, this teacher who assured me that passion in writing and expressing ones most inner feelings is not a sign of weakness by a man, instead a powerful tool that can make a man becoming a real man, one which at his most saddening moment of solitude, he can find greatest companion, and at his greatest urge to shout joy to the world, through them do so, yet it is in solitude, but it is still as if from the highest mountain, towards and in the presence of the greatest crowd ever gathered.

He is there, waiting, for sure. I have much to speak about with this brilliant teacher.

this is a book that can be re-read time and again throughout ones life and each time they'll take away more from each reading

Why?

That made me curious!

And you got my utmost respect for that!
Great list you got going there.