The Five People You Meet in Heaven

	The Five People You Meet in Heaven
	; First edition cover to the novel
Author	Mitch Albom
Cover artist	Claudia Evans
Country	United States
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Little, Brown & Time Warner Paperbacks
Publication date	25 September 2003
Media type	print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	228 pp (first edition, hardback) & 240 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-316-72661-3 (first edition, hardback) & ISBN 0-7515-3682-2 (paperback edition)

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The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a novel by Mitch Albom. It recounts the life and death of a simple yet dignified old man, Eddie. After dying in a freak accident, Eddie finds himself in heaven where he encounters five people who have significantly affected his life, whether he realized it at the time or not. Each imparts a divine piece of wisdom unto him, instilling a deeper comprehension regarding the most intimate facets of life. In the beginning he dedicates the book to his uncle Edward Beitchman. He says that he wants people like his uncle who felt unimportant here on earth to realize, finally, how much they mattered and how they were loved.

Albom's first novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven was published in 2003 by Hyperion, and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

[edit] Characters

[edit] Eddie

Since his days as a child, Ruby Pier was part of Eddie’s life. He played there every day as a child with his older brother and friends, and began working there as a teenager under the supervision of his father, who held Eddie’s position before his untimely death. After he returned from his stint in World War II he resumed his life at the pier, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Eddie underwent years of abuse from his father. It started with neglect, took a turn towards violence, and concluded with absolute silence. His father would beat him as a child in his drunken state, culminating one night shortly after Eddie returned from war. As his father took a swing at Eddie, drunk, Eddie resisted by grabbing his father’s fist, for which his father never spoke to him again. Eddie’s relationship with his parents became distant after that, living alone with his wife, Marguerite. A few years later, his father died of pneumonia. His mother did not react well, or even sanely. She seemed unable to cope with her husband’s death and entered a stage of denial, which necessitated Eddie’s permanent return to the apartment in which he grew up. From here he returned to working at the pier doing exactly what he was doing before he went off to war.

He lived the next few decades alone with Marguerite. They lived simply, their “deep but quiet” love (p. 156) getting them through the drudgeries of their everyday life. Unfortunately, Marguerite could not bear children, prompting them to routinely discuss the prospect of adoption. Eddie’s standard response was “we’re too old.” Marguerite’s rebuttal was “what’s too old to a child?”

They enjoyed their marriage together without a hitch until Eddie’s 39th birthday, when they fought over the phone as Eddie called Marguerite from the track to tell her of his winnings. To reconcile, Marguerite decided to drive to the track and apologize. But, along the way, she was involved in a gruesome car crash that landed her in the hospital for several months. After she was released, doctors found that she had a brain tumor. Marguerite died a few years later.

Eddie lived the rest of his life in remote solitude, keeping his job at Ruby Pier to keep him busy. He hobbled around the pier on his titanium-filled knee, a constant reminder of his time spent fighting in World War II. It is here that he meets his ultimate end, and the reader follows him throughout his exploration of the afterlife.

[edit] The Blue Man

As a young boy, Eddie spent many summer days playing with his friends and older brother at Ruby Pier. While playing catch with his friends one afternoon, the baseball Eddie received for his most recent birthday is inadvertently thrown into the street. As Eddie scampers to retrieve it, he steps in front of a car. The driver, in a panic, swerves and narrowly avoids collision with one car then veers into an alley and crashes into the back of another car resulting in his death. Eddie escapes without a scratch.

In Eddie’s first stop in heaven, it is revealed that this was “The Blue Man,” or Joseph Corvelzchik. Joseph lived his life as an attraction in a freak show at Ruby Pier. He emigrated from Poland in 1894, and, like most immigrants of the time, struggled to get by financially. At the age of 10 he took a job working in a sweatshop sewing buttons onto coats. His father always told him to avoid eye contact with the foreman and to remain unnoticed. But, one day, he spills a pile of buttons all over the floor right in front of the foreman, who tells him that he is useless and must go. As his father pleads with the foreman to let him stay, Joseph soils himself in front of the foreman, his father, and the entire industry.

His father never forgave him. As the years passed, his nervousness and incontinence persisted, further humiliating him and disappointing his father. In an act of desperation, Joseph resorted to a primitive medicinal measure – drinking silver nitrate. As this, later considered to be poison, did not cure him of his ailments, he assumed he was not taking a high enough dosage. As he continued to ingest more and more silver nitrate, his skin began to change colors (which he remedied by taking more silver nitrate), until eventually he was completely blue. He was left jobless after being fired from the sweatshop for scaring other workers. Eventually he found refuge with a group of carnival men, and his life as a “commodity” had begun. After traveling from carnival to carnival, he found permanent employment at Ruby Pier, where he was referred to as the best freak in the entire show. He lived above a sausage shop, playing cards at night with fellow circus performers and even occasionally Eddie’s father, earning his living by sitting in a cage all day, half dressed, as people walked by and stared in shock, awe, and sometimes, disgust.

He explains that when Eddie retrieved his ball from the street, although he was quite safe and sound, the Blue man wasn't. Eddie had given him a heart attack when he was driving due to a sudden halt and the Blue man was not mad at Eddie because of this, which confused Eddie. The Blue Man then taught Eddie his first lesson, that we are all somehow or another connected. Everything that we do affects what will happen to another. The Blue Man then tells him "Strangers are family you have yet to come to know", meaning that although they never met, what Eddie did affected his life from then on.

The Blue Man taught Eddie the following lesson.

"There are no random acts , we are all connected"

[edit] The Captain

Eddie was shipped off to the Philippines during World War II, “The Captain” was Eddie’s commanding officer. He was a few years older than Eddie and his fellow men and had spent his life in the military, as did three generations of his family before him. His stern demeanor and quick temper were his most noticeable attributes. He made a promise to his men: no man gets left behind.

The Captain is the second person Eddie meets in heaven. Here, it is revealed that he was the one who shot Eddie in the leg, crippling him for life. However, unbeknownst to Eddie, the captain was actually saving his life, as Eddie was about to run into a burning hut thinking he saw the shape of a small child burning in the ruins. Shortly after saving Eddie, the captain steps on a land mine and is killed. His lesson was about sacrifices.

The captain has taught Eddie the following lesson .

"Sacrifice is the noblest thing you can do "

[edit] Ruby

As a young girl, Ruby worked at the Seaside Diner, a small diner neighboring what would become Ruby Pier that Eddie used to frequent before it was torn down years ago. She was a beauty back in those days, and as such turned down many men until a young businessman, Emile, sat down in her diner. Ruby did not have much money growing up, and as such was blown away by Emile’s monetary whimsicality. After sufficient courtship, Emile proposed to Ruby and she gleefully accepted. To capture her eternal youth and the everlasting happiness their marriage would undergo, Emile built an amusement park in her name: Ruby Pier.

Ruby, the third person he meets, goes on to tell Eddie about the near-complete destruction of Ruby Pier. For Independence Day, Emile hired extra workers and utilized fireworks to draw extra customers. However, some of the “roustabouts” were drinking one night and began setting off fireworks, causing a fire that almost burned the entire pier to the ground. In a frantic attempt to save his life’s work, Emile tried to extinguish the fire with buckets of water, and in the process was critically injured and ended up in the same hospital room with Eddie’s father. Because of this, she is able to recount to him his father’s final living moments to him. Ruby helps Eddie understand the importance of forgiveness.

[edit] Marguerite

Eddie met his wife, Marguerite, right before his 17th birthday. Having met her only once, he ran home to his older brother and proclaimed that one day she would be his wife. Although premature, this prediction turned out to be accurate. They wed on the Christmas Eve following his return from the war, on the second floor of Sammy’s, a small Chinese restaurant. It was a simple wedding. Eddie used what little money he had from the army on their food (roasted chicken with Chinese vegetables) and entertainment (a man with an accordion).

They had a happy, loving marriage even though they could not have children. They were planning to adopt a child until the events of Eddie's 39th birthday. That day he won $800 at the track and called Marguerite to tell her the good news. However, she did not respond positively. Out of spite Eddie put all his winnings on the next race. Marguerite attempted to drive to the track to apologize for yelling at him on his birthday and to convince him to stop betting. On her way there, a couple of drunken kids dropped whiskey bottles off the freeway and landed on her car. This caused her to get in a car crash that lacerated her liver and broke her arm. The cost of the medical bills and her health issues made them ineligible to adopt.

It is difficult to reconcile with a loved one after such a tragic event, and so Eddie and Marguerite's marriage changed. They often sat in silence that was permeated by sullen tension. As time passed, however, they were eventually able to overcome their emotional disconnect and become loving companions once again. A few years later Marguerite died of a brain tumor. She is the fourth person Eddie meets.

Marguerite teaches Eddie that, even though she had died, their love was never gone. It just took a different shape. Until Marguerite teaches him this, Eddie had felt as though she had been taken from him too early and that their love was torn to pieces.

[edit] Tala

During the war, Eddie was held captive in the Philippines by a troop of Japanese soldiers. After he and his fellow captives were able to escape, he set fire to their barracks. As he watched a straw hut burn to the ground, he thought he saw the shape of a small child inside and thought he heard screaming. Unsure if what he saw was real or a hallucination, he tried to run into the burning hut to save the child but was stopped, shot in the leg by his captain, thus saving Eddie's life.

Eddie later finds out in the book that he was, in fact, not hallucinating. He finds out that the child's name was Tala and she explains to him that the hands he felt on his own were not Annie's but hers, guiding him to heaven. Tala had forgiven Eddie, but she tells him to "wash" her of the burns. When he rubbed a wet rock up and down on her burns, they disappeared. Tala then tells Eddie that he kept children safe from harm.

[edit] Minor Characters

[edit] Eddie’s Father

As a child, Eddie had a very troubled relationship with his father. Like most children, he had a deep devotion to his father, despite his abuse . Even when he was young, Eddie’s father rarely paid attention to him, and as he grew older, his mother handed out the love while his father became the disciplinarian. When they visited the pier together, his father would often dump him into the custody of a stranger, with whom Eddie would spend the entire day until his father returned, often wasted. His father would beat him and his brother regularly—another result of his alcoholism. However, despite his years of abuse, Eddie still adored his father. This adoration made him strive to please his father, at first through his work with him at Ruby Pier. Initially, the only task Eddie was allowed to perform was crawling under the Ferris wheel to gather loose change. Later, he was given more responsibility, such as operating the brakes on some of the rides. Eventually, his father trusted him to repair broken mechanical parts, the completion of which earned his father’s approval. Eddie would come home tired, grease wedged under his fingernails, starkly contrasting his brother, who would come home tanned and smelling of the sea from his job as a lifeguard. For this, he gained favor over his older brother, but his father did not express it any more emphatically than a silent nod—the initial stages of a father-son relationship based on unspoken understanding and denial of affection.

Shortly after Eddie returned from war, any semblance of a relationship he had with his father ceased. Recovering from his war injury, he slipped into depression, something his father could not understand. Coming home drunk one night and finding Eddie asleep on the couch, his father began berating him to get a job. In his drunken state, he quickly became angry, and eventually violent. As he tried to punch Eddie, Eddie grabbed his fist in defense. His father never spoke to him again, citing the fact that “that boy raised a hand to me.”

Years later and unbeknownst to Eddie until he arrives in heaven, Mickey Shea, one of his father’s oldest and closest friends, attempted to rape Eddie’s mother. Eddie’s father chased Mickey out of the house and onto the pier, where Mickey fell into the water and began to drown. Eddie’s father dragged the man he initially set out to kill safely to shore. From this he caught pneumonia and died shortly thereafter. His dying breaths were spent hanging halfway out his hospital window screaming for Eddie’s mother, brother, and Eddie himself.

[edit] Eddie’s Mother

Eddie’s mother does not play a prominent role in the story. The only role she really plays is when Eddie talks to Ruby. Later on in the story, Eddie's father saves Mickey's life showing forgiveness -what Ruby teaches Eddie. She was very affectionate towards Eddie and his brother, Joe, as they were growing up—a contrast to her husband’s “tough love.” After her husband’s death, she slipped into denial, and died shortly after.

[edit] Joe

Eddie took a different path in life than his older brother, Joe. The discrepancies between Joe and Eddie became clear early on, specifically one afternoon when Joe was jumped in an alley by “hoodlums,” as their mother called them. Eddie grabbed a trash can lid and used it as a weapon to fend off his brother’s attackers. For having to be saved by his younger brother, Joe was forever ashamed, as his father praised Eddie for being the tough one.

This trend continued into their teenage years, when Joe worked as a lifeguard while his brother and father performed grueling manual labor all day. This reinforced his father’s notion that he was not “tough.” Eventually, he got a job in hardware sales, where Eddie noted he made three times his maintenance salary. Joe dies years before his brother, leaving Eddie alone in life.

[edit] Chapter Summaries

[edit] The End, The Journey

(Pages 1–33)

This is a story about a man named Eddie. The story begins at the end and counts down the time he has left in his life beginning with one hour. At work on Eddie’s 83rd birthday, there is an accident at Ruby Pier (where a young girl is about to get crushed and killed), on Freddy's FreeFall where Eddie has worked maintaining the rides for almost his entire life. A man loses his car key (it gets stuck in the gears of a ride), and as a result one of the cables is snapped causing the cars to be suspended hundreds of feet in the air. After the people in the car escape safely, the car is released and begins to drop. Eddie notices a young girl underneath, about to be crushed. He sacrifices his own life in an attempt to save her, and his soul goes to heaven, where he learns the most important lessons in life from the Blue Man, the Captain, Ruby (from the Pier), his own wife Marguerite, and Tala, the little girl in the barn [for this act Eddie's life changed].

[edit] The First Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

(Pages 34–57)

The first person Eddie meets in heaven is “The Blue Man,” a member of a carnival freak show often presented at Ruby Pier. “The Blue Man,” or Joseph Corvelzchik, attained his “freak” status by using silver nitrate as treatment for his nerves and incontinence as a child, resulting in argyria. Although at first Eddie is frightened by the and hereafter for inadvertently causing Joseph’s death, Joseph is interested in nothing of the sort. Instead, he gives Eddie his first lesson that all are connected. Everything we do may affect others. He tells Eddie that he will meet five people in heaven. Joseph then adds, "Some you knew, maybe some you didn't. But they all crossed your path before they died. And they altered it forever."(p.35)

[edit] The Second Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

(Pages 58–101)

The Second Person Eddie meets in heaven is the Captain. Throughout his life, Eddie had used his war injury as a crutch. His inability to advance further in life than a ride maintenance man, to achieve personal goals – for everything, the blame lay on his war injury. Many of the pier workers did not know it was an actual gunshot wound, and believed it was from fight with one of his fellow soldiers. The lesson in this chapter was about forgiveness. This was shown when the Captain told Eddie that he was the one to give Eddie the gunshot wound. "I took your leg, to save your life." Eddie was so transfixed on entering the burning hut that, if he wasn't shot, he would have died. While Eddie initially took this as a shock and assaulted the Captain, he later thanked him, understanding finally that he was doing the best he could.

[edit] The Third Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

(Pages 103-153)

Eddie is then taken to an isolated diner amidst snow-covered purple mountains. Here he meets "Ruby", for whom without many thoughts Ruby Pier was built many years ago by her wealthy husband. She shares with Eddie her innermost secret: her wish that the pier was never built, because the count who has ever suffered at the pier. Ruby’s story reflects the idea that events before we are born still affect our lives, as do the people before us.

After sharing this with Eddie, she tells him how his father died. Ruby witnessed everything from the other side of the curtain in the same hospital room, where she was tending to her own ill husband. Using the story of his father’s death, Ruby explains to Eddie his third lesson in heaven.

We cannot remain angry at one another for things in the past. Although we may be under the impression that we can damage someone by upholding hatred for them, the reality is that we are harming ourselves even more than the ones we hate. Ruby stresses the importance of forgiveness. She reminds him of the light, pure feeling he enjoyed upon first arriving in heaven – this elation is derived from a soul that is free of anger, something only attainable in death. But, in life, in order to overcome the anger we all inevitably feel, we must first understand why we feel angry and then realize why we do not need that feeling, and in turn how to rid ourselves of it.

[edit] The Fourth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

(Pages 154 – 190)

After leaving Ruby, Eddie moves through various wedding receptions in his next stage of heaven. At one of the weddings, he encounters a woman handing out chocolates “for the bitter and the sweet.” It is his wife, 'Marguerite'. As they dance from wedding to wedding, he tells her of everything she missed over the final 40 years of his life that he spent alone. Eventually, they discuss her death. She died too soon, and for this, Eddie was angry. Marguerite’s response is the fourth lesson Eddie learns in heaven.

It is never easy to deal with the loss of a loved one, and nearly impossible to cope with the premature death of a spouse. Although life is finite, love is eternal. Marguerite explains to Eddie that even after a loved one dies, the feeling of love lives on. In the absence of a physical connection, another emotion grows stronger than before: memory. As they dance together at their own wedding they share a final embrace, until Marguerite disappears and Eddie is once again left alone.

[edit] The Fifth Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

(Pages 191-206)

In Eddie’s final stage in heaven he finds himself in a sea of white, empty and silent. He hears the sounds of screaming children – the same sounds that have haunted his dreams ever since the day he escaped captivity in the Philippines. Upon investigating the source of these screams, he finds children playing peacefully in a river. They are screams of joy, not of horror. Amongst the children, he finds a young Filipino girl, Tala. It turns out that she was the shadow he saw in the burning hut. He was responsible for her death.

After hysterically screaming and sobbing, Eddie collapses before the little girl, who shares with him his final lesson. Eddie explains to her that he was sad because he feels as if he didn’t do anything meaningful with his life. To this, she responds by sharing with him his purpose on earth. “Children. You keep them safe. You make good for me. Is where you were supposed to be. Eddie Main-ten-ance.” (p. 191).

Before Eddie exits his final stage in heaven, Tala tells him that he did, in fact, successfully push the young girl to safety from the plummeting ride. Eddie is confused at first, telling Tala that he felt his arms pulling her, not pushing. It turns out that these arms belonged to Tala, who was pulling him into heaven, keeping him safe.

Eddie is then swept away and is brought back to the pier. He sees thousands of people, some dead, some yet to be born. They are all people whose lives Eddie had unknowingly saved by maintaining the park rides. Finally, he comes to a beautiful, young, Marguerite sitting on a Ferris wheel. He looks at the clouds forming into one word: Home.

[edit] Epilogue

(Pages 207-208)

The Pier returns as it did before Eddie’s death. Dominguez carries on with Eddie's old maintenance job. Albom reiterates the idea that all lives are connected by revealing that the owner of the key responsible for the ride malfunction and in turn Eddie’s death is the great-grandson of Ruby. The girl Eddie saved, “Amy or Annie,” many years from now will see in her first stage in heaven “a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: that each affects the other and the other affects the next, and this world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.” (p. 196)

[edit] Major Themes

But where Morrie proved so inspirational among the Chicken Soup for the Soul crowd, this similarly themed parable suffers from the shift of Albom's role from pupil to teacher. It was easier to embrace the homilies in Tuesdays With Morrie as the wisdom of the ages because they came from a professor who was old. He was beloved. He was dying. And he was imparting these lessons to a former student who self-deprecatingly depicted himself as an overly ambitious hotshot, a guy who thought he knew it all until the venerable professor showed him how much he had left to learn.

The insights of Morrie Schwartz--"Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live" or "The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in"--would have fit just fine on a greeting card, but the book served as a gentle reminder of the basic truths that so many of us are too busy to remember. The humble palm-sized volume had the sort of staying power that kept it a bestseller for years after its publication. (Ironically, given its "stop and smell the roses" message, the book's popularity served to shift Albom's career into multimedia overdrive, with his radio, TV and print commitments keeping him busy enough for three journalists.)

Since it may have seemed too blatantly manipulative to follow Tuesdays With Morrie with a more obvious sequel--Wednesdays With Marty, say, or Thursdays With Tony--here Albom trades memoir for fantasy. The book again introduces an old man on the verge of death, but The Five People You Meet in Heaven finds the author channeling his own inner Morrie, as he shows both his octogenarian protagonist and the reader just how much dying can teach us about living.

The book's opening chapter follows eighty-three-year-old Eddie, a maintenance worker at an amusement park, through the last hour of his life, one in which he either saves or doesn't save a little girl from a fatal accident. "It might seem strange to start a story with an ending," intones the oracular author. "But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time."

What Eddie needs to learn is what Tuesdays With Morrie taught, that we discover the richness of life by anticipating its end: "Had he known his death was imminent, he might have gone somewhere else. Instead, he did what we all do. He went about his dull routine as if all the days in the world were still to come."

After starting with a chapter titled "The End," Albom leads Eddie through "The Journey," "The Arrival," along a pilgrimage of surprise encounters in the afterlife. Heaven is variously depicted as an amusement park, a battlefield, a diner, a smorgasbord of wedding receptions--whatever has filled the dreams of the other angels that Eddie meets in a progression that illuminates the life he's so recently lost.

Yet, in Albom's reverie, heaven also has some aspects of a pyramid scheme, a rite-of-passage process in which each new arrival needs five who arrived before him to show him the way. The guides then move up the ladder to the next stage of the afterlife, after preparing the initiates to take their places as guides to the newly dead.

Among those whom Eddie encounters are his beloved wife and his estranged father, but also others he fails to recognize or never knew. He learns how others died so that he might live, how tragedy for one person provides opportunity for another and how each life's story is interrelated with all the others, in patterns that are impossible to appreciate until one gains some necessary perspective on one's own life. "No story sits by itself," muses Albom, the inscrutable sage. "Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river."

Yet Eddie's story mainly serves as an excuse for a string of quasi-platitudes, warmed-over wisdom such as "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." Or "Sacrifice is a part of life, sometimes the best part. And it's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

Enough. A little of this goes a long way, though Albom's short chapters, paragraphs and sentences never challenge the most limited attention span. Eddie gets smarter. The reader gets warmer. The writer gets richer. Fridays With Freddy, anyone?

[edit] Inspiration: The Real Uncle Eddie

The main character, Eddie, was actually based on Mitch Albom’s uncle Eddie. Both the fictional and real versions of Eddie were war veterans who died at 83 and lived simple lives, both feeling that they had not accomplished everything in life they should have. As a child, Albom listened to one of his uncle’s stories during Thanksgiving dinner. Eddie told him of a night when he went to the hospital with a raging fever. He awoke in the middle of the night, and sitting at the foot of his bed were dead relatives. Upon being asked by exuberant children what he did, Eddie replied: “I told them to get lost. I wasn’t ready for them yet.” After this, Albom began to think about the concept of heaven. Perhaps it was not a utopian paradise, but more of a place where you can gain insight into your life after you have died through people you have loved, encountered, or even never met, in your life.

[edit] Film Adaptations

In 2004, a TV movie of the same name stars Jon Voight as Eddie. Directed by Lloyd Kramer, the film was nominated for a Primetime Emmy. Other actors include Dagmara Dominczyk (Marguerite), Jeff Daniels (Blue Man), Ellen Burstyn (Ruby), Michael Imperioli (Captain), and Steven Grayhm (young Eddie).

[edit] Quotations

"All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "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 doesn't govern life and death. For if it did, no good man would ever die young."
"It is because the spirit knows deep down that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else. And in that small distance, lives are changed."
"One withers, another grows."
"Each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."
"Strangers," the Blue Man said,"are just family you have yet to come to know."
"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."
"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped."
"That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays."

[edit] Ruby Pier

The fictional amusement park "Ruby Pier" where Eddie works doesn't really seem to draw many parallels to the real life amusement park "Luna Park" located in Coney Island, although it also has many similarities, but also to Pacific Park as well. These parallels include...

Both parks are named after people close to the original owner
- Luna Park for owner's sister Luna
- Ruby Pier for owner's wife Ruby (one of the people Eddie meets in heaven)
Both parks had fires that lead to the loss of the original ownership
- Ruby Pier fire leads to the selling of the park
- Because of the expensive costs, Luna Park is let go by the original owner(s) (not sold away)
Both parks had/have very grand entrances
- seem to be described (by the book and in pictures of Luna Park) as very similar entrances by the large scale and grand arches/domes

[edit] External links

The Five People You Meet in Heaven at the Internet Movie Database
The Five People You Meet in Heaven publication history at the Internet Book List
Official Book Webpage