Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him, as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It’s a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age,
Eddie’s five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his “meaningless” life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: “Why was I here?”
The First Person Eddie Meets in Heaven: The Blue Man
- People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps.
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 understanding your life on earth.
People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and moun!tains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.
“I am your first person, Edward. When I died, my life was illuminated by five others, and then I came here to wait for you, to stand in your line, to tell you my story, which becomes part of yours. There will be others for you, too. Some you knew, maybe some you didn’t. But they all crossed your path before they died. And they altered it forever.”
Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young.
Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should ?
“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.”
“When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. It is why we are drawn to babies …”
“Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know. No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
The Second Person Eddie Meets in Heaven: Captain
YOUNG MEN GO to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
It’s the thinking that gets you killed.
- War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
- Men adapt to captivity, some better than others.
The Third Person Eddie Meets in Heaven: Ruby
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.
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.
The Fourth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven: Marguerite
PEOPLE SAY THEY “find” love, as if it were an object hid!den by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is acertain love.
LOVE, LIKE RAIN, can nourish from above, drench!ing couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nour!ish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive
All the Best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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