Important Events In The Five People You Meet In Heaven

People don’t realize the most important moments in life until they have passed, and they have time to look back on them and realize how these moments have shaped them. In The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom it tells the story of Eddie’s moments and how they have redirected and shaped his life. The three most important events in Eddie’s lifetime are the day he meets Marguerite, the shadow he sees in the barn, and the day he is shot in the leg.

The first important event is day Eddie meets Marguerite, he learns about the love and happiness he can experience in life. Very early in the novel Eddie says “Every life has one true love snapshot” (p.9). For Eddie his snapshot is of a gorgeous girl named Marguerite. “For the rest of his

Eddie decided to leave for the warfare after his 18th birthday, he went through several horrifying events and the tragedy of the war, but is able to come home alive. Following the war he came home injured, because in Eddie’s last night of war he is shot in the knee. The bullet got wedged in between bones and even after surgery, Eddie is told his leg is permanently injured. Consequently, this became a enormous moment in Eddie’s life. Resulting the loss of his ability to properly use his leg Eddie began to see the world and his life as painful. Moreover, he lost everything when he lost his leg, and he came out of that hospital a changed man for the worse. Nevertheless, he never knew how he is shot until he got to heaven. The second person Eddie meets in heaven is his captain from when he was in the war. Proceeding his meeting with the captain, the captain reveals that “‘…I was the one…who shot you’” (p.86). Eddie reacts in a normal manner when he is exposed to this evidence, he is filled with abhorrence, irritation, fury, and sorrow. “’My…leggggg!’ Eddie seethed. ‘My life!”(p.88). Throughout the novel, Eddie has always blamed his leg from stopping his dreams. It is his leg that prevented him from becoming an engineer, leaving Ruby Pier, and doing almost any activity he once enjoyed. Continuing to think about his leg Eddie realized “His running was over…worse, for some reason, the way he used to feel about things was over too. He withdrew. Things seemed silly or pointless. War had crawled inside of Eddie in his leg and in his soul” (p.85). If it isn’t enough that he is shot in the leg, that night another memory has always haunted