This has to be one of the best books that I have ever said. The book is by Mitch Albom.
From the back of the book:
"All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..."
On his eighty-third birthday, Eddie, a lonely war veteran, dies in a tragic accident trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. With his final breath, he feels two small hands in his - and then nothing. He awakens in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a lush Garden of Eden but a plae where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. These people may have been loved ones or distant strangers. Yet each of them changed your path forever.
Quotes from within.
"...there are no random acts. That we are all interconnected. That you can no more separate one life from another that you can separate a breeze from the wind... Fairness," he said, "does not govern life or death. If it did, no good person would ever die young... Look at the mourners. Some did no even know me well, yet they come. 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. You say you should have died instead of me. But during my timeo n earth, people died instaed of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleagues falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of the whole..." Page 50-51
"Sacrafice is part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to. Little sacrafices. Big sacrafices. A mother works soher sone can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. A man goes to war..." Page 97
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like prisine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces beyond repair. Page 109
This book saw me shedding tears. I was sitting on the train and sobbing softly. I love this book. Anything that makes me feel and anything that makes me think about my beliefs is a great book. This book is so good, I may even read it again... and that really says something.