Sunday, July 29, 2007

Eddie's Lessons Essay #2

Ashley Booth
Instructor Holder
English 102
July 6, 2007
Eddie’s Lessons

In Mitch Albom’s novel The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Eddie, a maintenance man at Ruby Pier amusement park, dies saving a little girl from a crashing rollercoaster. The next thing he knows, Eddie meets five people in heaven, all of whom have something to teach him about the life he lived. Whether Eddie knows these people or not, each of them has a story to tell. These five simple lessons help Eddie to understand why his life, and death, was important and had purpose. Through these five lessons, Eddie begins to understand more about his life and about the five people he meets.

The first person Eddie meets in heaven is the Blue Man, the first man that Eddie ever killed. Part of the freak show at Ruby Pier, the Blue Man meets him in the first place they ever saw each other, the freak show tent. Eddie does not understand why the Blue Man is one of his five people, for they have never spoken to each other before. Despite this, the Blue Man begins with the story of the day he died, telling Eddie that he died because a little boy ran out in front of his car while chasing after a ball. Because of his weak heart he had a heart attack and died several minutes later on the side of the road. Eddie was that little boy chasing after a ball. The Blue Man goes on to tell Eddie that “no story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river” (Albom 10). Even though they never truly knew each other, their stories are still intertwined. The Blue Man’s story shows Eddie that there are no random acts, that we are all connected and “that you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind” (Albom 48). The stories of everyone in Eddie’s life are all one, all part of a bigger story.
The next person Eddie meets in heaven is the Captain, Eddie’s commanding officer in the war. After recounting the story of their last day in a prison camp in the Philippines, the Captain talks to Eddie about sacrifice. They both made sacrifices during the war. Eddie sacrificed the full use of one of his legs while trying to rescue a little girl in a hut in the prison camp, and the Captain sacrificed his life to get Eddie and the other men of the company to safety, leaving no one behind. Eddie has always begrudged the loss of the use of his leg, but according to the Captain, “sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to” (Albom 93). Because of the Captain’s sacrifice, Eddie lived.

Everything happens for a reason, and everything we do affects others, never just ourselves. This is the lesson that Ruby, Eddie’s third person, has to teach. She is Ruby Pier’s namesake and the woman who stayed by her husband’s bedside in a room he shared with Eddie’s father. Eddie and Ruby have never seen each other, never met, but her existence affected every day of his life. Because of her, Eddie worked at Ruby Pier his entire life. She tells him that “things that happen before you are born still affect you…. And people who come before your time affect you as well” (Albom 123). Her existence and her husband Emile’s creation of Ruby Pier both affected Eddie’s life.

Marguerite, Eddie’s late wife, is the fourth person to visit him in heaven. At the age of 47 she died of a brain tumor and ever since Eddie blamed her for leaving him alone and taking away his love. However, she goes on to tell him that “love lost is still love…. Life has to end… but love doesn’t” (Albom 173). Because of her, Eddie has true love in his life. Without her, he would not have known that kind of love and his life might have been very different.

The final person Eddie meets in heaven is Tala. Tala lived at the prison camp Eddie was kept in during the war. When Eddie was leaving the prison camp, he helped burn down all the huts in the valley, and Tala was in one of them. He thought he saw her through the smoke, but could not get to her. Despite his mistakes and his actions which caused her death she is willing to share with him one of the most important of the five lessons. Eddie thought throughout his entire life that he did not have purpose, that he was worthless. He was ashamed of his life because he had not made anything of himself, he was weary and unsatisfied with where he was in life, but he was too busy to leave and make another life for himself. However, Tala goes on to tell him that he did have a purpose, that his life had meaning. His purpose was to keep children safe while they were at Ruby Pier. Even though he accidentally killed Tala, he spent the rest of his life protecting children like her.

After meeting all five people: the Blue Man, the Captain, Ruby, Marguerite and Tala, Eddie realizes that what the Blue Man said is true. He said “the only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we’re alone” (Albom 50). All his life, Eddie wished he were someone else, someone better. The five people and five lessons in heaven teach him that his life was important, that he affected people he had never even met, and that he kept thousands of children safe on the rides at Ruby Pier. Finally, he learned that stories, like stones in a riverbed or leaves on an oak tree, all touch one another eventually

Works Cited
Albom, Mitch. The Five People You Meet in Heaven. New York: Hyperion, 2003.


Comment:
This piece will surprise people because it is surprisingly good for having been written in a mere hour. As I stated in my Strengths/Weaknesses post, what I write first is typically what I keep in my final draft. I was having a hard time coming up with a good topic for this essay, so I just sat down and wrote what came into my head and this is what I ended up with.

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