I just finished reading Mitch Albom’s book “the five people you meet in heaven” and it is the first book in a long time to make me cry.
I don’t know what happens to us after we die…maybe there is an afterlife, maybe we just cease to exist and that is it. I know that I don’t believe in the religious versions of Heaven and Hell, but I want to believe that just maybe this life is but one step along a journey that leads to something else.
The author has his own idea of what the afterlife may be… a place where your life on Earth is explained to you by five people who were in it, loved ones and strangers alike, who permanently altered your path. Each of these individuals, having gone through this process themselves, gets to choose where they want to wait for you. What they move on to after they play their role in your afterlife is not explained.
The love story aspect of the book is what got me crying, but it is something else altogether that kept me weeping so that I needed to lay the book down at one point.
This book belonged to a friend of mine who left the world of his own accord in early January. As I sat reading and thinking about what an appealing vision of heaven this was, I wondered if he had felt the same. Did that vision of heaven flash before him as he wrote the note? Was he at peace feeling that he was headed toward answers and understanding?
Maybe he never even got to reading it. Or, maybe he didn’t even find Albom’s idea to be appealing or possible. But, I can’t stop wondering how it affected him knowing now the relationship he had with death.
