It’s strange to cry over a novel in the early hours of the morning, but that’s what I did when reading Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. This is what the blurb on the back cover says:

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time…”

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.

What got me crying? It was the part of the story where Eddie meets his wife Marguerite. She died before him and she’s one of the five people he meets in heaven, one of the five people who explains his life to him.

Even in his worst moments, Eddie had never stopped loving Marguerite, nor she him. And she’s young again when they meet in heaven. He’d felt his loss every day of his life after she’d died, and all he wants to do is to be reunited with Marguerite.

They review what they’d had togetherand what they’d missed. They’d not been able to have a longed-for child because she’d been severely injured when her car swerved into the central barrier of the highway when a bottle dropped by drunken teenagers from an overbridge had shattered the windscreen. She’d been on a mission of love to rescue Eddie on his birthday from a racetrack where he was gambling away the money they’d been saving to have the child.

Their love had faltered, but it had never disappeared. And it revived as they grew older together. Eddie was desolate and lonely when she died, and to meet her again in heaven is his heart’s desire.

Well, that part of the story triggered thoughts and feelings about my [tag[love[/tag] for Erica and our lives together, what we’ve had together and what we’ve missed. In fact, we were talking this morning at breakfast about one relocation we both felt had been wrong - for ourselves and our children. If we could wind the clock back, and knowing what we know no, we wouldn’t do that again.

But that’s the rub, isn’t it? We do what we do, we make the decisions we make, without fully being able to foresee the consequences.

What really made me cry, though, was the fear of loss. How could I live if I lost the one who is closest to me, who knows me best, of whose love I have absolutely no doubt?

Albom’s book is written in a straightforward prose, no flowery language, and the characters are not particularly exalted or noble. But he writes about profound things, life, death, things that are matters of the human spirit.

It’s worth reading.

Technorati Tags: Mitch Albom, Heaven, life, death

Saturday 26 August, 2006 Spring is coming earlier, autumn is coming later - at least, it is in Europe, according media reports yesterday. There’s good science to demonstrate this beyond a peradventure. So why am I looking out at a cloudy sky on a cool, grey day, with rain? In August!