The Five People You Meet in Heaven Read Online Free PDF

the damage, then collapses onto the wet pavement. His arm throbs. His chest hurts. It is Sunday morning. The alley is empty.
    He remains there, unnoticed, slumped against the side of the car. The blood from his coronary arteries no longer flows to his heart. An hour 26
    passes. A policeman finds him. A medical examiner pronounces him dead. The cause of death is listed as "heart attack." There are no known relatives.
    Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily, at an arcade, with the little boy in tawny pants dropping pennies into the Erie Digger machine, and the other ends badly, in a city morgue, where one worker calls another worker over to marvel at the blue skin of the newest arrival.
    "You see?" the Blue Man whispered, having finished the story from his point of view. "Little boy?"
    Eddie felt a shiver.
    "Oh no," he whispered.

    Today Is Eddie's Birthday
    He is eight years old. He sits on the edge of a plaid couch, his arms crossed in anger. His mother is at his feet, tying his shoes. His father is at the mirror, fixing his tie.
    " I don't WANT to go ," Eddie says .
    " I know," his mother says, not looking up, "but we have to.
    Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen ."
    "But it's my BIRTHDAY."
    Eddie looks mournfully across the room at the erector set in the corner, a pile of toy metal girders and three small rubber wheels.
    Eddie had been making a truck. He is good at putting things together.
    He had hoped to show it to his friends at a birthday party. Instead, they have to go someplace and get dressed up. It isn't fair, he thinks.
    His brother, Joe, dressed in wool pants and a bow tie, enters with a baseball glove on his left hand. He slaps it hard. He makes a face at Eddie.
    " Those were my old shoes," Joe says. "My new ones are better ."
    Eddie winces. He hates having to wear Joe's old things.
    "Stop wiggling," his mother says.
    "They HURT!" Eddie whines.

    27
    "Enough!" his father yells. He glares at Eddie. Eddie goes silent.
    At the cemetery, Eddie barely recognizes the pier people. The men who normally wear gold lame and red turbans are now in black suits, like his father. The women seem to be wearing the same black, dress; some cover their faces in veils.
    Eddie watches a man shovel dirt into a hole. The man says something about ashes. Eddie holds his mothers hand and squints at the sun. He is supposed to be sad, he knows, but he is secretly counting numbers, starting from 1, hoping that by the time he reaches 1000 he will have his birthday back.

    The First Lesson
    P LEASE, MISTER . . ." EDDIE PLEADED. "I DIDN'T know. Believe me . . . God help me, I didn't know."
    The Blue Man nodded. "You couldn't know. You were too young."
    Eddie stepped back. He squared his body as if bracing for a fight.
    "But now I gotta pay," he said.
    "To pay?"
    "For my sin. That's why I'm here, right? Justice?"
    The Blue Man smiled. "No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you."
    Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched.
    "What?" he said.
    "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."
    Eddie shook his head. "We were throwing a ball . It was my stupidity, running out there like that. Why should you have to die on account of me ? It ain't fair ."
    The Blue Man held out his hand. "Fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."

    28
    He rolled his palm upward and suddenly they were standing in a cemetery behind a small group of mourners. A priest by the gravesite was reading from a Bible. Eddie could not see faces, only the backs of hats and dresses and suit coats.
    "My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when