The Next Person You Meet in Heaven

“No story sits by itself. Our lives connect like threads on a loom, interwoven in ways we never realize.”

One of the novel’s primary themes is the way Interwoven Human Connections become the essence of existence itself. Each person that Annie meets in heaven is somehow connected to her in a significant way, and each of those people is connected to many more. Annie views her life as a series of mistakes, but each person she meets helps teach her that those “mistakes” actually affected many others and all had deep purpose.

“Do you know what causes wind? High pressure meeting low pressure. Warm meeting cold. Change. Change causes wind. And the bigger the change, the stronger the wind blows. Life is much the same. One change blows in another.”

Wind is used as a symbol of change in the novel. It is first introduced when Annie and Paulo’s hot air balloon meets a strong wind and is blown into some power lines. A long series of occurrences led to that moment, and this passage illustrates that each event in a person’s life is preceded by many more. Annie learns this especially well when she meets Sameer, whose own accident started a shift in medicine that resulted in his ability to one day help Annie.

“In the dizzying hour that followed, one sentence clung to her like an anchor: This is my fault.”

Albom uses a simile with a nautical connotation after the balloon accident, foreshadowing the way Annie plunges into a sea of blue in the afterlife. Throughout the novel, Annie repeatedly tells herself that she always makes mistakes, and that the terrible things that have happened in her life are all her fault. This mindset weighs her down, just as an anchor weighs down ships. It takes meeting five important people for her to realize that there is no such thing as mistakes, which finally frees her from the weight of her guilt.

“It felt as if she was swimming upstream against her memories.”

Again, Albom uses the imagery of water to illustrate Annie’s struggle. Many of Annie’s experiences in heaven are metaphorical, representing what is going on inside her mind as she learns the lessons she needs to return to Earth. Here, Annie is entering the afterlife, and it first appears before her as a blue sea of color.

“But it wasn’t my time. I’m not old or sick. I’m just… […] a person who makes mistakes.”

In this quote, Annie not only foreshadows her later return to Earth, but also demonstrates her reluctance to view Death as a Part of the Life Cycle. She still pictures death as an ending, rather than a new stage of existence. This quote also illustrates the way Annie views herself as just an insignificant person who makes mistakes and ruins things around her. Sameer teaches her that the events of her life rippled out to affect many more people than she could ever imagine, showcasing Interwoven Human Connections.

“Thanks to my ignorant chasing of a train, many future patients were healed.”

Sameer teaches Annie about Interwoven Human Connections through his own life experiences. Both he and Annie had serious accidents that resulted in their limbs—her hand, his arm—being separated from their bodies. Both had their limbs reattached using revolutionary methods. Not only did Sameer’s accident inspire him to become a doctor, which led to his helping Annie, but Annie’s accident led to advancements in limb reattachment surgery as well. Sameer does not therefore believe in regret, and tries to show Annie that she need not regret what she views as mistakes.

“We forget that ‘our’ time is linked to others’ times. We come from one. We return to one. That’s how a connected universe makes sense.”

Sameer reminds Annie that life and death do not revolve around a single individual. One of the primary purposes of meeting five people in heaven is to show the extent of Interwoven Human Connections and help people realize that they have touched lives they never knew about. Connections do not know the boundaries of time or space and can extend across generations and the world. Sameer uses repetition to impart an important truth to Annie: Her brief life is just one link in a long chain of human existence.

“They growled and yipped and whipped up sand everywhere.”

Albom’s prose often contains poetic elements. Here is an example of Albom using simple rhymes to convey the imagery and potency of the situation that Annie is witnessing before her. The dogs initially appear aggressive, attacking Annie’s mangled body, but after Annie meets Cleo, the dogs become docile and loving.

“These colors, and all the firmament’s colors since her arrival, reflected the emotions of her life on Earth, replaying as that life was replaced. But Annie could not know this.”

Imagery is strong in the novel, particularly when Annie is in heaven. It is a dreamlike landscape where scenes are constantly changing around her. Albom uses descriptions of color to convey these changing moods and atmospheric elements as Annie progresses through the stages of the afterlife. One of the novel’s dramatic ironies is the fact that Annie is yet unaware of what the colors around her mean, just as she is unaware of many things she is soon to learn, such as her mother’s history and the truth of the Ruby Pier accident.

“The end of loneliness is when someone needs you.”

The main lesson that Annie takes from Cleo is that her loneliness in childhood had a purpose. Annie’s experiences made her unique, which brought close to her those people and animals who saw that uniqueness as a positive. Annie’s loneliness brings her to Paulo, but also to Cleo, who Annie empathizes with due to their shared experiences of isolation and injury. After Annie adopted Cleo, neither of them needed to feel lonely again.

“Annie felt older now, stronger; it seemed she was reconstructing her Earthly body as she advanced through heaven. Her thoughts were maturing as well. An edginess had come over her, a young adult’s impatience. She wanted answers.”

After Annie meets Cleo, she starts to find within herself a strength that she never had before. She remembers the feelings of love, loyalty, and companionship that she felt with Cleo and with Paulo. The lessons she is learning are causing her to mature and gain the wisdom she needs to understand herself and her life, but there is much yet to be uncovered, which leaves her as a young adult—an in-between stage. The slow transformation of Annie’s body is a symbol of this inner growth.

“Annie stumbled forward, into her mother’s eyes, which opened like a deep well, swallowing her whole.”

The physical and the emotional are one and the same in Albom’s heaven. When Annie meets her mother, she enters Lorraine’s eye to see the world as Lorraine sees it. Annie has gained both courage and curiosity through her experiences in heaven, and is finally ready to hear the story of her childhood from her mother’s point of view.

“She said ‘courage’ like it was something rare and precious. Lorraine wanted that for her child. She wished she had more of it herself.”

Annie’s name is a symbol of the courage that she has. Lorraine named her after a very brave woman, and though Annie does not initially view herself as courageous, Lorraine helps her see herself differently. She notes how difficult life has been for Annie, and how she always pressed forward despite that. This moment explores both Interwoven Human Connections—as Annie’s name comes from other people’s hopes and dreams—and The Purpose of People, Suffering, and Life, as it allows Annie to look beyond her pain to see her own strength.

“The things we have done are never far behind us. And like a shadow, they go where we do.”

This simile demonstrates the similarities between Annie’s life and her mother’s, and how these similarities ironically led to conflict. Both Annie and her mother carried dark secrets throughout their adult lives: deep regrets about past actions that haunted them and affected the decisions they made. Both women began to feel like failures as nothing ever seemed to work out in their favor. After Lorraine reveals her secret—her deep regret over leaving Annie alone—Annie finally feels comfortable revealing her own, and in doing so opens herself up to the opportunity to see her son in the next eternity.

“Just because you have silenced a memory does not mean you are free of it.”

This aphorism summarizes one of the primary sources of pain for both Annie and her mother during their lives: the secrets they kept and the memories they suppressed. Both women are influenced by events of their past that they wish to forget, and neither is able to escape them. Lorraine lived out her life regretting the pain she caused Annie, while Annie kept her son’s death deep inside, unable to tell her late mother. Annie must face the experiences that haunt her in order to find inner peace, and she can only do so with Lorraine’s support, demonstrating The Purpose of People, Suffering, and Life and Interwoven Human Connections.

“Annie watched the heavenly sky turn a dull red.”

When Annie’s mother confesses her deepest regret, which was neglecting Annie on the day of the accident at Ruby Pier, the firmament around Annie reflects Lorraine’s emotional state. The dull red represents love intermingled with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Each person that Annie meets influences their own eternity in this way.

“Secrets. We think by keeping them, we’re controlling things, but all the while, they’re controlling us.”

Although Albom’s book refrains from being blatantly dogmatic, it does take on a moralistic approach, such as in this passage. Albom sets up Annie and Lorraine as relatable characters by examining their struggles through a broad lens of human experience. Though not every reader will relate to Annie’s and Lorraine’s experiences—feelings of failure as mothers, for instance—Albom focuses their conversation on secrets and regrets, which are more relatable to a wider audience.

“And then, the truth was, Annie found her footing.”

As Annie talks with her mother, she gains a better understanding of The Purpose of Suffering. Annie has low self-esteem and fixates on the pain she has suffered, but Lorraine urges her to look past that and see the good that she did in life. Annie tells her mother about the loss of her son, and Lorraine helps her remember that it was this experience that drove her to become a nurse, which led to her helping countless people. This quote also makes use of alliteration; it is common for Albom to draw on poetic techniques such as this to further add to his literary style.

“I ruin everything. Even the good things. Even my wedding night. It was my idea to help a man on the highway. My pushing for a balloon ride…. I make so many mistakes.”

Annie’s self-blame began when her parents divorced and continued all throughout her life. Over the years, she has made what she considers to be a series of mistakes that ruined everything she ever loved, and she does the same when thinking back on the events that led to her and Paulo’s deaths. It is not until Annie meets Eddie, who explains how her accident resolved many of his life’s conflicts, that Annie is finally able to adjust her mindset and let go of her guilt. Eddie helps Annie realize The Purpose of People, Suffering, and Life.

“Tala explained why I was there. To protect kids, the thing I didn’t do with her. She told me I was right where I was supposed to be.”

Eddie’s story in the first novel in the series, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, is similar to Annie’s but in many ways darker. When Eddie and some other soldiers escaped imprisonment at a village in the Philippines, they burned the village as an act of revenge, which cost young Tala her life. When Eddie meets Tala in heaven, he is shocked by how readily Tala is able to forgive him, but she explains that his efforts to keep children safe at Ruby Pier absolved him of his past mistakes. Eddie attempts to impart this lesson to Annie: Everything has a purpose and there are no mistakes.

“That’s how salvation works. The wrongs we do open doors to do right.”

Albom incorporates Christian ideology into his novel in several ways. One of these is his mentioning of salvation, specifically for Eddie. Eddie took an innocent life with his past actions, but he found salvation in maintenance work at Ruby Pier, which protected many other young people from serious harm. Annie’s wrongs in life, including the balloon accident, ultimately lead to a better future, as her choices allow her to experience heaven, gain the wisdom that she will impart to others, and go on to raise her daughter.

“You only have peace when you make it with yourself.”

While Annie is in heaven, she is meant to make peace with her past, her mistakes, and the people who hurt her. In doing so, she can move forward with her life and fulfill her purpose on Earth. During her meetings with people in heaven, Annie wants desperately to make peace with each of them, but it is only herself she needs to make peace with; everyone else has already forgiven her.

“Loss is as old as life itself. But for all our evolution, we have yet to accept it.”

When Annie meets Paulo in heaven, she is distraught to realize that she was not able to save him. This threatens to undo the progress she has made, as she struggles to remember the lessons she learned on her way to him. Paulo, however, is the embodiment of acceptance and understanding; meeting him helps Annie accept losing him, which allows her to move forward with her life instead of letting grief destroy her. It is Paulo who tells Annie The Purpose of People, Suffering, and Life, and he is the one who pushes her back to Earth.