The summer before my senior year of high school, my three- year-old brother, Ben, was killed, attacked by a neighbor’s two malamute dogs who, accustomed to being penned in a small kennel most of their lives, were having their daily hour of activity, running loose through the unfenced yards in a small Eastern Shore town. It was a terrible accident, one that even now can surface in my dreams, vivid in their grotesque details. It is something my family does not discuss.

Mitch Albom earned his popularity with his earlier best selling exploration of life and death, Tuesdays with Morrie. In that book, the author recorded his weekly experiences visiting a mentor from his younger years during the man’s slow decline and eventual death. The story moved hundreds of thousands of people with its honesty, self-exploration, and questioning. Now, in The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Albom approaches similar topics using fiction. The simplicity of the tiny novel is reminiscent of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or even Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

My brother’s straw blond hair and mischievous grin is memorialized in countless, but unmentioned, photographs on my mother’s walls. There was a lot of guilt to go around that summer. My mother for being at work instead of home, my grandmother for being inside the house when he was not, my one sister for watching, helpless, as it occurred, the other sister for playing alone instead of with her younger siblings, the young dog owner for letting them run loose, and me for not being there at all. The guilt is pointless, irrelevant, and, in some cases, unjustified. Guilt leaves out extenuating circumstances, heroic efforts, and instead concentrates on what-ifs. Guilt masks the other tenuous connections that exist and can comfort.

The basic premise of Albom’s book is "that each [person] affects the other and that the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one." Often, when I enjoy a particular book it is because the author has a special way of guiding readers to see parallels between lives in the form of fictional characters; she or he may be an especially rich storyteller, able to suspend numerous moments and details in a fragile yet intact web that somehow makes sense at the end, leaving the reader shaking her head or holding his breath at the complex unity of it all. The most accurate metaphors are admittedly overused: the story is a tapestry; it is woven, not written; characters are threads, textures, or strands. It is because this type of writing is so close to the truth of our lives that I am attracted to it. I marvel at the same minute connections Mitch Albom explains so simply in Five People.

After a week in the hospital, Ben was officially declared brain-dead, kept alive only by pumping machines that hissed and clicked and beeped and separated him from my mother, who hadn’t eaten, hadn’t showered, hadn’t moved, from her swollen and battered son’s side. We sat in a room, my mother and I, and listened as the doctor explained her options. She silently signed a form that would allow his organs to be "harvested," a term I both despise for its medical distance and love for its earthy connotations; its images of ancient virgin-mother-crone rituals and cyclic comforting explanations for life, for death, for anything in between appeared in front of the silent watery scene in a hospital conference room.

Mitch Albom’s character is Eddie, a maintenance man at an old seaside amusement park called Ruby’s Pier, originally designed to increase weekend railway traffic and revenue during the summer. Eddie, who turns eighty-three the day of his death, is a second generation maintenance man, having taken over the position following his own father’s death many years before. He is old, alone, and quiet, a man with many memories, both good and bad, but one who has spent at least the last thirty years, if not more, dwelling on his own losses, his what-ifs. He dies attempting to save a young girl under a falling cart from the Freddy’s Free Fall ride. His story begins with his death, as Albom puts it, at the end. "It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time."

Eddie begins his ascent through heaven. Along the way, he meets five different people who somehow, often unbeknownst to him, affected the course of his life or vice versa. Each has a small secret to share, a lesson that will help Eddie make better sense of his own losses. He learns that "there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can a breeze from the wind." A man who lived on the periphery of Eddie’s life and was killed when Eddie was a boy is the first to greet him in heaven. Because of this man’s death, Eddie lived, yet he had no idea of his role in the events. The man comforts Eddie, "Strangers...are just family you have yet to come to know."

Making a sacrifice without belaboring the act, letting go of anger, finding forgiveness for yourself and others, knowing love through loss, seeing the accomplishments in your own shortcomings: these are all lessons Eddie must learn. Through his flashbacks and via the different perspectives his five people give him, Eddie finds peace at last. Along the way, Albom hopes readers will be moved to examine their lives, too, and perhaps begin the process a little sooner, recognize the connections that exist outside of our field of vision, accept what we cannot always see or feel. Albom’s book is not about religion at all, but a spirituality that transcends organization. It is about what makes us human.

Several years after Ben’s death, my stepmother, then a nurse for an agency, was working the night shift at a hospital near Baltimore where she was not usually assigned, having been sent there to fill in for someone who called in sick. The ward she covered was fairly quiet that night, and she became engaged in a conversation with a man in his late twenties, admitted for a minor internal infection and due to be released soon, but who was also suffering through a period of depression. Laura spent a lot of time talking with the man that night, and he eventually sighed and remarked that he really needed to find a way out of his depression, that he was actually a very lucky man. When Laura asked him to elaborate, he explained that several years before, he was very sick, near death from a failing liver. He was saved, however, when the family of a boy killed by dogs on the Eastern Shore decided to donate the boy’s organs. He was one of twenty-odd people who received a piece of that boy’s life.

Albom writes, "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." Not everyone has the opportunity to recognize this as personally as I have, to make some sense of loss before my death, but perhaps Albom’s book can touch you in a way that at least makes you consider the possibilities.