THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN What is heaven? It seems that today there are countless ideas about what "heaven" is. The fact is, none of us can say for sure. Some believe that heaven is where we look back on our lives here on Earth as a way to learn from our mistakes. Author Mitch Albom wrote a story called The Five People You Meet in Heaven that follows one man through such a journey. In the story, a man named Eddie is tragically killed in an accident. What follows is his journey to heaven where he meets five people along the way. Each of the five people is there to teach Eddie a different lesson he must learn before entering heaven. Each of the five people Eddie meets in paradise presents ideas that serve as the themes of this novel. The five lessons Eddie must learn are: that every person is interconnected in some way, sacrifice, forgiveness, understanding, and that he doesn't need to be famous to make a difference in the lives of those around him. Each of the lessons Eddie learns are themes in the novel that Albom would like the audience to take away from the story. Eddie has spent his entire life living in the same place. Like his father before him, Eddie worked as a maintenance supervisor at the local amusement park. When Eddie died, he found himself for the first time in the park he had known all his life. There, he met one of the workers Eddie had known since he was a child. The man he met told him a story from when Eddie was a child. Eddie and his friend were playing catch when their ball fell onto the street. When Eddie went to retrieve it, a car swerved out of the way, almost hitting him. The man then told Eddie the same story, this time from the point of view of... half the paper... tirelessly without feeling like he had accomplished anything. The main character Eddie lived a life very similar to that of Albom's uncle. When Eddie died, he was sent on a journey where he met five different people who were there to teach Eddie. These five lessons are also the five themes of this novel. These include: that every person is interconnected in some way, sacrifice, forgiveness, understanding, and that we don't need to be famous to make a difference in the lives of those around us. Albom uses plot effectively to illustrate these points to the reader. The audience walks away from the story with a sense of what Albom was trying to do when he wrote the story. WORKS CITED "About the 'Real' Eddie," available online at http://www.albomfivepeople.com/abouteddie.htm, April 3, 2006.Albom, Mitch The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Hyperion, N