The End
It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But
all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time. (p.1)
Every life has one true-love snapshot. For Eddie, it came on
a warm September night after a thunderstorm, when the boardwalk was spongy with
water. (p.10)
No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners
and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.
(p.11)
How do people choose their final words? Do they realize
their gravity? Are they fated to be wise? (p.14)
The First Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where
they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without
solace is meaningless. (p.37)
The First Lesson
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. (p.50)
Fairness does not govern life and death. If it did, no good
person would ever die young. (p.50)
Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die?
Why people feel they should? 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. (p.50)
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. (p.51)
Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.
(p.51)
No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we
spend thinking we are alone. (p.52)
The Second Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to,
sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This
comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen
courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice with laying them down.
(p.59)
War is no game. If there’s a shot to be made, you make it,
you hear? No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don’t think
about who you’re shootin’ or killin’ or why, y’hear me? You want to come home
again, you just fire, you don’t think. It’s
the thinking that gets you killed. (p.62)
The Second Lesson
Time is not what you think. Dying? Not the end of
everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning…The
way I see it, that’s what we’re getting here, soldier. That’s what heaven is.
You get to make sense of your yesterdays. (p.96)
Sacrifice. You made one. I made one. We all make them. But
you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn’t
get it. 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 movers home to take care of
her sick father. (p.97)
Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not
really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else. (p.98)
“My wish was to see what the world looked like without a
war. Before we started killing each other.”
“But this is war.”
“To you. But our eyes are different. What you see ain’t
what I see.” (p.99)
The Third Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.
Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents
smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little
pieces, beyond repair. (p.109)
The damage done by Eddie’s father was, at the beginning, the
damage of neglect. (p.109)
This was the second damage done, the one after neglect. The
damage of violence. (p.111)
This was the final handprint on Eddie’s glass. Silence. It
haunted their remaining years. (p.115)
All parents damage their children. This was their life
together. Neglect. Violence. Silence. And now, someplace beyond death, Eddie
slumped against a stainless steel wall and dropped into a snowbank, stung again
by the denial of a man whose love, almost inexplicably, he still coveted, a man
ignoring him, even in heaven. His father. The damage done. (p.115)
Things that happen before you are born still affect you. And
people who come before your time affect you as well. We move through places
every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our
workplaces, where we spend so much time—we often think they began with our
arrival. That’s not true. (p.130)
Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go
of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them—a
mother’s approval, a father’s nod—are covered by moments of their on
accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart
weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their
accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon
stones, beneath the waters of their lives. (p.134)
The Third Lesson
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
curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. (p.149)
The Fourth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
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. Once she’d
gone, he’d let the days go stale. He put his heart to sleep. (pp. 164-165)
Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples
with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on
the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself
alive. (p.174)
The Fourth Lesson
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 more 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. (p.184)
Life has to end. Love doesn’t. (p.185)
The Fifth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven
Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken, and Eddie knew. (p.191)
In human accounting, his body was near its end. (p.192)
