THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN

This is one of my favorite parts from one of my very favorite books- THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN. You just have to read this book...


The Fourth Lesson

FINALLY, AFTER MANY TALKS, Marguerite walked Eddie through another door. They were back inside the small, round room. She sat on the stool and placed her fingers together. She turned to the mirror, and Eddie noticed her reflection. Hers, but not his. "The bride waits here," she said, running her hands along her hair, taking in her image but seeming to drift away. "This is the moment you think about what you're doing. Who you're choosing. Who you will love. If it's right, Eddie, this can be such a wonderful moment." She turned to him. "You had to live without love for many years, didn't you?" Eddie said nothing. "You felt that it was snatched away, that I left you too soon." He lowered himself slowly. Her lavender dress was spread before him. "You did leave too soon," he said. "You were angry with me." "No." Her eyes flashed. "OK. Yes." "There was a reason to it all," she said.
"What reason?" he said. "How could there be a reason? You died. You were forty-seven. You were the best person any of us knew, and you died and you lost everything. And I lost everything. I lost the only woman I ever loved." She took his hands. "No, you didn't. I was right here. And you loved me anyway.

"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."

Eddie thought about the years after he buried his wife. It was like looking over a fence. He was aware of another kind of life out there, even as he knew he would never be a part of it. "I never wanted anyone else," he said quietly. "I know," she said. "I was still in love with you." "I know." She nodded. "I felt it." "Here?" he asked. "Even here," she said, smiling. "That's how strong lost love can be."

She stood and opened a door, and Eddie blinked as he entered behind her. It was a dimly lit room, with foldable chairs, and an accordion player sitting in the corner. "I was saving this one," she said. She held out her arms. And for the first time in heaven, he initiated his contact, he came to her, ignoring the leg, ignoring all the ugly associations he had made about dance and music and weddings, realizing now that they were really about loneliness. "All that's missing," Marguerite whispered, taking his shoulder, "is the bingo cards." He grinned and put a hand behind her waist. "Can I ask you something?" he said. "Yes." "How come you look the way you looked the day I married you?" "I thought you'd like it that way." He thought for a moment. "Can you change it?" "Change it?" She looked amused. "To what?"
"To the end." She lowered her arms. "I wasn't so pretty at the end." Eddie shook his head, as if to say not true. "Could you?" She took a moment, then came again into his arms. The accordion man played the familiar notes.
She hummed in his ear and they began to move together, slowly, in a remembered rhythm that a husband shares only with his wife.

You made me love you
I didn 't want to do it
I didn't want to do it. . . .
You made me love you
and all the time you knew it
and all the time you knew it. . . .

When he moved his head back, she was 47 again, the web of lines beside her eyes, the thinner hair, the looser skin beneath her chin. She smiled and he smiled, and she was, to him, as beautiful as ever, and he closed his eyes and said for the first time what he'd been feeling from the moment he saw her again: "I don't want to go on. I want to stay here." When he opened his eyes, his arms still held her shape, but she was gone, and so was everything else.