The Five People You Meet in Heaven compared to Tuedays With Morrie

   The Five People You Meet in Heaven starts off in Amusement park where an older man named Eddie is a maintenance worker, he spent the majority of his life working at Ruby Pier where he feels like his life is meaningless and wasted. On Eddie's 83rd birthday he begins his usual routine at Rubys Pier but then a malfunction occurs with one of the rides and Eddie looses his life to save a little girl. The book then takes you through Eddie's journey and experience in heaven where he realizes his life wasn't as meaningless as he thought.

   The Five people You Meet in Heaven has a very similar message to another book called Tuesdays With Morrie. In Tuesdays With Morrie it takes you through a mans final days of living, he spends his last days teaching a former student the importance and value of life and commonly says "once you learn how to die you will learn how to live." However, is dying something we can really be comfortable with? In Eddie's Journey in heaven one of the first things the book says is that "every hurt he'd ever suffered, every ache he'd ever endured- it was all gone as an expired breathe." Morrie stresses the importance that death is not scary and its something that can be just as good as living. 

   Similar to Morrie, people in Eddie's life had a very big impact on him however, Eddie never realized until he died. The first person Eddie met in heaven was a man named Joesph that Eddie unknowingly altered his life forever. Is it possible to not realize how much people change our lives? When Eddie was seven years old his baseball got thrown in the street and he ran after it, Joesph was driving down the street and saw Eddie, he slammed on his breaks. Eddie got the ball, ran away and never looked back. However, Joseph suffered from a heart attack due to the stress making his heart pump fast and died. The lesson Joseph wanted to teach Eddie was to see things from two different perspectives and how the same moment can effect people very differently.

   The Second person Eddie met in heaven was his captain from war. The captain comes to Eddie to try to instill in him that life is only the beginning and their is a lot more to be learned.  He explains to Eddie that "heaven is where you get to make sense of your yesterdays." The captain has the same philosophy as Morrie did when trying to explain to his former student that life is only the start and that death is not the end.

    Both Morrie and the first two people Eddie meet in heaven are there to help two people that lost the meaning in life and feel hopeless. Their main goals are to make sure Eddie and the student feel comfortable with death and believe that their is more to be learned. They also wanted them to see how people truly do make an impact on your life and cross your path for a reason, even if you don't realize what that reason is right away.
Tuesdays with Morrie movie Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1N4W7_Qhao