The 5 People You Meet in Heaven

"All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time . . ."

The First Lesson (Blue Man)

• "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 a wind."
• "Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."
• "...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 are gone, 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 . . . And to funerals."
• "Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."
• "No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

The Second Lesson (the Captain)

• "Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of everything. But what happens on earth is only the beginning."
• "I figure it's like in the Bible, the Adam and Eve deal? Adam's first night on earth? He doesn't know what sleep is. His eyes are closing and he thinks he's leaving this world, right? Only he isn't. He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has his yesterday. . . That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays."
• "Sacrifice. You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what is lost. "You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of your 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 sck father. "A man goes to war . . ."
• "...Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

The Third Lesson (Ruby)

• "...Because of loyalty." "Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death?" "Better to be loyal to ne another."
• "Holding anger is poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."
• "...No one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed from it."

The Fourth Lesson (Marguerite)

• "Love lost is still love. It takes a different, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. Memory. Memory becomes you partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it."
• "Life has to end, Love doesn't."

The Last Lesson (Tala)

*This last person summarizes what kind of life Eddie lived. It is his realization of everything that happened before, the answers...*

• "I was sad because I didn't do anything with my life. I was nothing. I was lost. I felt like it I wasn't supposed to be there."
• "Children, You keep them safe . . . Is where you supposed to be, Eddie Main-ten-ance."

*And he finally knew that he was able to save the child... and it was Tala's hands that he felt touched him... pulling him up to heaven...*