The Five People You Meet in Heaven

But all endings are also beginnings.We just don't know it at the time.
NO STORY SITS by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.
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.
The manager once called me the "best freak" in his stable, and, sad as it sounds,I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be  cherished.

...

It may not sound like much, but for me, it was a freedom I had rarely known.

...

TAKE ONE STORY, viewd from two different angles.
Now take that same story from a different angle.
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 overto marvel at the blue skin of the newest arrival.
"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.

...

"Fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."

...

Some didnot even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they shoud?
"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.
"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you aregone, 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..." He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals."
"Strangers," the Blue Man said, "are just family you have yet to come to know."
"The only timewewasteis the timewe spend thinking we are alone."
War was his call to manhood.
In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.
His head was spinning. For so many years, he had been haunted bythat one moment, that one mistake, when his whole life changed.
He wakes up the next morning and he has afresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has his yesterday.

...

"The way I see it, that's what we're getting here, soldier.That's what heaven is. Youget to make sense of your yesterdays.?
He was part of your life, part of why you lived and how you lived,part of the story you needed to know, but he told you and he's beyond here now, and in a short bit, I'm gonna be as well.

...

Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.
Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else.
Silence. It haunted their remaining years. His father was silent when Eddie moved into his own apartment, silent when Eddie took a cab-driving job, silent at Eddie's wedding, silent when Eddie came to visit his mother.
Where was he going? What was he thinking? Which was worsewhen he left unexplained: a life, or a death?
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 curve blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.
PEOPLE SAY THEY "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable.
" Lost Love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.
"Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't."
... but he felt his body being washed from his soul, meat from the bone, and with it went all the pain and weariness he ever held inside him, every scar, every wound, every bad memory.
... that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.