The Five People You Meet In Heaven

“The last hour of Eddie’s life was spent, like most of the others, at Ruby Pier, an amusement park by a great gray ocean.”

Ruby Pier is one of the major settings of the novel, and it also sets the tone of Eddie’s life—at least how he saw the tone of his life. Eddie felt his life was mundane and pointless, each day just like the day before. The gray ocean illustrates a sad, melancholy existence without the colors of happiness and pleasure.

“Eddie’s job was ‘maintaining’ the rides, which really meant keeping them safe. Every afternoon, he walked the park, checking on each attraction, from the Tilt-A-Whirl to the Pipeline Plunge. He looked for broken boards, loose bolts, worn-out steel. Sometimes he would stop, his eyes glazing over, and people walking past thought something was wrong. But he was listening, that’s all. After all these years he could hear trouble, he said, in the spits and stutters and thrumming of the equipment.”

Eddie’s job description shows how important this job is to Eddie and how seriously he takes his responsibility, despite insisting that he hates his job and feels stuck in the life it has forced him to live. Eddie is very good at his job and has kept the park running safely for many, many years, and this says something about his character that he does take his job this seriously.

“Children looked at Eddie—who, with his protruding lower jaw, always seemed to be grinning, like a dolphin—and they trusted him. They drew in like cold hands to a fire. They hugged his legs. They played with his keys. Eddie mostly grunted, never saying much.”

Eddie’s job requires him to be around lots of children. He does not encourage these children to like him, but they show trust and are drawn to him. Eddie’s sense of responsibility to these children is a major thread of the novel and this introduces the ideas behind the overall theme.

“A young girl, maybe eight years old, stood before him, blocking his sunlight. She had blonde curls and wore flip-flops and denim cutoff shorts and a lime green T-shirt with a cartoon duck on the front. Amy, he thought her name was. Amy or Annie. She’d been here a lot this summer, although Eddie never saw a mother or father.”

Amy or Annie is the child Eddie attempts to rescue when Freddy’s Free Fall breaks down. In this introduction, Amy or Annie is one of many children who come regularly to Ruby Pier, and one Eddie sympathizes with because he never sees her parents around. This moment between Eddie and Amy or Annie shows that Eddie isn’t as callous toward children as he would like to believe, but that he has a great deal of compassion for the children who visit the amusement park.

“In those final moments, Eddie seemed to hear the whole world: distant screaming, waves, music, a rush of wind, a low, loud, ugly sound that he realized was his own voice blasting through his chest. The little girl raised her arms. Eddie lunged. His bad leg buckled. He half flew, half stumbled toward her, landing on the metal platform, which ripped through his shirt and split open his skin, just beneath the patch that read EDDIE and MAINTENANCE. He felt two hands in his own, two small hands.”

The final moments of Eddie’s life are related through his own senses, providing a rich illustration of his death. Eddie hears the world around him, sees the child in danger, and feels hands in his own. In that final second, Eddie believes he is holding the hands of Amy or Annie, but at the end of the novel, he discovers this is not true. As Eddie attempts to save a child, he is rescued by a child and pulled into the reward of death and the knowledge of what everything he experienced meant.

“Heaven? Eddie thought. Ridiculous. He had spent most of his adult life trying to get away from Ruby Pier. It was an amusement park, that’s all, a place to scream and get wet and trade your dollars for kewpie dolls. The thought that this was some kind of blessed resting place was beyond his imagination.”

Eddie does not see Ruby Pier through the Blue Man’s eyes or understand that it was the first place where the Blue Man felt completely accepted and loved by the people around him. Here, Eddie’s feelings about Ruby Pier throughout his life are shown, but as he travels through heaven, he will discover that many other people in his life saw it very differently, and his opinion of it will grow and change as well.

“Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily, at an arcade, with the little boy in tawny pants dropping pennies into the Erie Digger machine, and the other ends badly, in a city morgue, where one worker calls another worker over to marvel at the blue skin of the newest arrival.”

Sometimes two people can cross paths and their meeting can have a profound impact on one or the other, while one might not even remember the encounter. This is what happened with Eddie and the Blue Man, ending one life, and setting another on a path that he won’t always be satisfied with. This is a lesson Eddie must learn to understand the many other lessons that will come his way as he gains knowledge of the penultimate moments of his life.

“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 confused with laying them down.”

The tone of war is introduced as Eddie prepares to confront a pivotal figure in his past. When Eddie was barely an adult, he willingly volunteered to serve his country in World War II, and the decision would have an overwhelming impact on the rest of his life. Eddie’s reasons for going to war are partially explored here within the fact that societal expectations combined with Eddie’s desire to gain the approval of his father sent him into a war zone.

“Something darted across the door opening. Eddie tried to focus. The heat was intense, and he shielded his eyes with his free hand. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d just seen a small figure running inside the fire.”

This quote introduces a penultimate moment in Eddie’s life. However, Eddie does not yet appreciate how important this moment truly is. As Eddie relives the horrors of his experiences in the war, he remembers escaping the prisoner camp and burning down the buildings, seeing a figure run through one of the buildings he lit on fire, and believing it was an innocent he needed to save. His captain later tells him he was hallucinating because of battle fatigue and that the captain shot him to save his life. As the novel continues, Eddie will learn that the truth is much worse than he ever could have imagined.

“That’s the thing. Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”

The second lesson Eddie is meant to learn in heaven is like the first lesson. The captain talks about sacrifice and how it works in the living world. For the second time, Eddie learns that someone died while he continued to live. This underscores the idea that Eddie was meant to live his life for a purpose, yet he doesn’t know what that purpose is at this point.

“It was Monday. It was morning. They were waiting for the old man to come in and get the workday started.”

Eddie has lived a life he feels is inconsequential. However, in his absence, the men he worked with are struggling with his absence because they had grown so dependent on his leadership. This is the first of several indications that Eddie’s life impacted more people than he ever believed.

“Eddie catches his eye. His father looks down and runs his hand over the windowsill. Eddie tightens every muscle in his body and attempts, by sheer will, to force the tears back into their ducts.”

Children can often struggle at some point in their relationship with one or both of their parents. Eddie struggles to achieve the approval of his father. Just after he returns from the war and is still healing from his injuries, Eddie celebrates a birthday in the hospital with his family but finds himself struggling to hide the depression that will hound him for years to come from his family, a depression he hides because he is afraid to look weak in the eyes of his father.

“All parents damage their children. This was their life together. Neglect. Violence. Silence.”

Several opportunities are used to describe the tension between Eddie and his father. Eddie’s father was abusive at times and he was also easily distracted from his responsibilities as a father. It is this relationship and its many dimensions that begin to shape Eddie’s life. In death, Eddie can look back on that relationship and see how it impacted him to prepare him for forgiveness.

“’What wish?’ Eddie said. ‘That he had never built that place.’ The old woman sat in silence. Eddie studied the vast jade sky. He thought about how many times he had wished this same thing, that whoever had built Ruby Pier had done something else with his money.”

The third person Eddie meets in heaven is the woman whose husband built Ruby Pier for her and named it for her. After a massive fire left her husband injured and bankrupt, Ruby wished that the amusement park had never been built, touching on the things Eddie felt for the place himself. They both have different reasons for disliking the park, but they share their unhappiness associated with the place.

“Eddie never said this—not to his wife, not to his mother, not to anyone—but he cursed his father for dying and for trapping him in the very life he’d been trying to escape; a life that, as he heard the old man laughing from the grave, apparently now was good enough for him.”

After his father’s death, Eddie felt trapped in the life he was living. He took over his father’s job at Ruby Pier by his own choice, but it felt like it was a choice forced upon him by his father’s death and his mother’s declining health. Eddie felt that his father manipulated his life one last time and that he would forever be trapped in the pattern his father long ago established for him.

“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.”

When Eddie meets his wife, Marguerite, in heaven, he becomes more emotional than he has been throughout most of the novel. Even seeing his father again does not bring out in Eddie the emotions that seeing Marguerite again. His meeting with Marguerite explores the depth of a ‘certain’ love, the impact it can have on a person, and the impact the loss of that love can cause. Just like the loss of Eddie’s father caused his life to change trajectory, so did the experience of loving and losing Marguerite.

“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.”

While Eddie remembers Marguerite and their marriage with a depth of love that cannot be denied, there was a time when their marriage struggled. After Marguerite’s accident and the loss of their chance to have a child, Eddie and Marguerite quietly drifted apart as they both grieved their circumstances. Rain is a metaphor for the struggles of marriage, and it expresses the struggles of Eddie and Marguerite’s marriage.

“At one point, he asked his wife if God knew he was here. She smiled and said, ‘Of course,’ even when Eddie admitted that some of his life he’d spent hiding from God, and the rest of the time he thought he went unnoticed.”

Eddie wanted to be an engineer and felt that life interfered with that choice and left him stuck in the same pointless life his father lived. Like many people, Eddie felt ignored and unnoticed not only by the people around him but also by fate and/or God, leaving him feeling as though he were not important enough to be noticed. Eddie felt as though he did not significantly impact anyone’s life or leave anything of consequence behind and he expresses that to his wife as he worries that the same will be true of his time in heaven.

“’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 move 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. ‘Life has to end,’ she said. ‘Love doesn’t.’”

The fourth lesson Eddie learns is about love. In meeting Marguerite in heaven, Eddie learns that love does not have to end, but it can continue. Eddie thought he lost Marguerite, but she shows him that his memories of their time together kept their love alive and allowed him to continue to nurture it even though they were far apart from one another.

“Then, as often happened with these visits, he silently congratulated himself on his own portfolio of stocks, bonds, and a vested retirement plan. It sure beat ending up like this poor slob, with little to show but a tidy kitchen.”

A lawyer visits Eddie’s home and judges his life’s worth by what he left behind. It is a common thing for people to do, judge one’s life by what is left behind. However, the novel expresses that life should be judged not by what is left behind, but by how that life was lived and how much love that person experienced.

“’The nipa. Ina say be safe there. Wait for her. Be safe. Then big noise. Big fire. You burn me.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘Not safe.’”

For the first time, Eddie learns that the shadow he saw in the hut on the night he and his fellow soldiers escaped their captors was real. The captain believed it to be a figment of Eddie’s imagination, but it was a little girl who was hiding from soldiers like Eddie and his buddies until her mother could return for her. Eddie tried to save her, but the captain shot him in the leg to stop him and left him with an injury that would cause him to struggle all his life. However, if Eddie had attempted to save her, he likely would have been burned alive as well.

“’Not her hands,’ she said. ‘My hands. I bring you to heaven. Keep you safe.’”

When Eddie jumped on the tracks of Freddy’s Free Fall, he felt a little girl’s hands in his own. Eddie believed those hands belonged to Amy or Annie, the little girl he was trying to save. However, Tala, the fifth person he meets in heaven, tells him that they were her hands as she pulled him into heaven and that he pushed Amy or Annie out of the way, saving her life.

“They were there, or would be there, because of the simple, mundane things Eddie had done in his life, the accidents he had prevented, the rides he had kept safe, the unnoticed turns he had affected every day.”

After feeling all his life that his existence was pointless, Eddie finally sees that he had a purpose during his lifetime. Eddie spent his life making the rides at Ruby Pier safe for all the children who visited there during his lifetime and left behind a young man who keeps them safe using the same methods Eddie taught him. Eddie’s life was not pointless but was filled with the responsibility of keeping safe the thousands of people who visited Ruby Pier each year, especially the children. Eddie was responsible for Tala’s death, but he made up for it by saving countless children with his work.