Mitch Albom's follow-up to "Tuesdays with Morrie" takes up where the 1997 best-selling phenomenon left off. While "Morrie" chronicled the slow illness and death of Albom's college professor and mentor Morrie Schwartz, his new novel "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" looks at what happens after death. The book follows the character Eddie, an 83-year-old amusement park maintenance man, as he meets five people in heaven whose lives he somehow touched--for better or for worse. Albom spoke with Beliefnet about the real-life "Eddie," the spiritual themes of the novel, and the five people he himself hopes to meet in heaven.

Who was your inspiration for Eddie?
Eddie is based on my old uncle, whose name was Eddie. He was very much like the character in the book--he was a member of the "Greatest Generation," he fought in World War II, over in the Philippines. He was a blue-collar kind of guy--a barrel-chested, white-haired, gruff kind of fellow. He'd punch you in the arm when he said hello. Like Eddie in the book he was a blue-collar worker his whole life, and like Eddie in the book, he felt that his life was insignificant. He'd never really done anything, he'd never gone anywhere. He basically was born and died in the same place. He'd get such a big kick out of my traveling. I'd call him from an airport. I'd say, "I'm calling from Cleveland," and he'd go, "Cleveland, wow! I can't believe it!" I felt terrible that he didn't think of himself the way I thought of him. I thought he was so great, but he thought he was insignificant.

He used to tell me this story about the night he got rushed into the hospital for open-heart surgery. The night of the operation it was very touch-and-go. He remembered waking up and rising and seeing all of his dead relatives sitting on the edge of his bed. Eddie would say, "I told them get the heck out of here! I'm not ready!" And they somehow scattered, and Eddie lived a little bit longer. Growing up, I always heard that story. So when people would ask me what I thought happens when we die, I'd always say, "Well, I know there are people waiting for you because my uncle told me so." He was the closest I've known anyone to come back from that.

So when I figured out what I wanted to do after "Tuesdays with Morrie," I knew I wanted to write fiction and keep some of the themes of "Morrie." I began to think about what happens next, when a person dies. I started to weave together a story about a guy like Eddie, who is blue-collar and feels unappreciated, and maybe he goes to heaven and he meets five people who tell him one by one the ways they were connected to him, and how he was much more significant than he thought. It's sort of a wish for my uncle as much as it is a fictional story.

Why did you set the book in an amusement park?
I wanted a backdrop that would make all the readers feel the same. It's very hard to pick a place that everybody feels the same about. If you pick the South, people who live in the South know it, but people who haven't been there don't know what you're describing. But if you pick an amusement park, everybody's gone there! It seems to evoke the same emotions in everyone: summer, innocence, childhood, the smell of popcorn and cotton candy, the sounds of those rides. I thought this would be a good backdrop to set a story about an old man because it's so much a place of innocence and childhood, so it seemed like a good contrast. I deliberately didn't say where the amusement park was, because I wanted everyone to feel like it was their amusement park.

What do you consider the main spiritual lessons of the book?
First, that we're all connected. Everybody affects everybody. We're all part of this big life force. There's a line in the book where the Blue Man, the first person Eddie meets in heaven, says, "You could no more separate one human being from another than you could separate a breeze from the wind." I think that that's true. I've learned that it's true with Morrie. There was this old guy, and he touched me, and I did something to try to pay his medical bills, and wrote this little book, and that touched somebody else, who touched somebody else. I really think that everybody is interconnected. We act like we're so different from one another but I don't think we are. Morrie used to say, 'We're more alike than we are different,' and I really believe that's true.

I guess the second spiritual lesson would be that we go through our lives with a lot of questions, particularly the kind of people I've met in the past six years [since "Morrie"] who have lost people. We ask: Why me? Why did I get sick? Why did my loved one get sick? Why did he have to die? We often die without these questions answered. We die without knowing. I always felt that if heaven is this redemptive place, and any kind of a paradise of some sort, the paradise is not necessarily going to be in the scenery. It's going to be that your questions get answered. I hope that we get our questions answered there, if heaven is indeed a place that's going to bring us something wonderful and redemptive.

The third lesson is that love is a lot stronger than people realize. One part of the book that has especially touched people is when Eddie sees his wife in heaven. He says to her, "I never loved anyone else after you died." She died when she was 47, so he lived another 30 years or so. She says, "I know, I felt it." People want to believe that. They want to believe that all the love they have for people that they've lost doesn't just go off into space somewhere once they die. Maybe they can't hold that person anymore, or dance with them, but if they still love them, that love finds its way somewhere. If that somewhere is beyond, it would be nice to know that those people can still feel it. I think a lot of people want to believe that, because they don't want to let go of that love. That's the best part of us--the part that loves other people. The third lesson is that lost love is not wasted love.

Did you believe in heaven before "Morrie?"
I think I believed in it in an educational point of view--I had been taught concepts of it [from different traditions]. As Morrie got closer to the end, I saw that he became more spiritual. He started talking about God, and he hadn't really done that early on. If you get to watch death in slow motion, as I did with Morrie, instead of watching a sudden death like getting hit by a truck, you can see the spirituality coming into the person as the physicality is lost. Morrie started asking, "Am I going to see Him? Am I going to be one of the angels?" Those kind of questions. That started to get in my head--I understood, this isn't a textbook now. This is right in front of me.

In the past six years, I've met so many people who talk about people that they've loved and miss. I just have to believe that there's something beyond. I have heard from people whose loved ones have died and the last word they said was "home." The word "home" appears twice in the book--once just as Marguerite is about to die, and she looks at the Ferris wheel and says, "You can see it from here." Eddie says, "What? The Ferris wheel?" And she says, "Home." At the very end of the book, when Eddie is nothing but a spirit, and he sees all the people whose lives he touched by taking care of the amusement park, they're all saying one word, as if it's one word from God. The word is "home." It's the concept of heaven being your eternal home.

Have you thought about who the five people you're going to meet in heaven are?
I have my hopes. I'd like to see my uncle again. I had another uncle who died young. My grandparents. I'd like to see Morrie. And I'd like to see at least one person who I didn't realize I had an effect on. That would make me feel that maybe my life is bigger than me or my immediate family. I hope there's somebody there who says, "You don't realize it, but what you did changed me for the better." It would prove that we are connected in ways that we don't realize.