Plot
The main character is a teenage girl named Didi, who appears to be an eccentric, orphaned goth, but who also insists that she is Death personified, taking her one day every hundred year sabbatical as a living person. She guides a suicidal young male protagonist called Sexton on a journey of self-discovery. As the story goes on, Sexton gains a reason for not wishing to die, his love for the girl claiming to be Death.
Gaiman's take, as he started in issue 8 of The Sandman, is a young, attractive, perky Death in this fresh interpretation of the concept. For it was said in Sandman 21: 'One day in every century, Death takes on mortal flesh, better to comprehend what the lives she takes must feel like, to taste the bitter tang of mortality.' Didi manages to eat from street vendors, run into a number of people including a megalomaniac known only as "The Eremite" (not overtly stated, but implied to be an alternate future version of Mister E, after his return from the end of time at Death's hands in the original Books of Magic miniseries), and a British woman named Mad Hettie who is looking for her heart.
A character similar to Didi appears in Gaiman's American Gods, in which she is seen at Rock City where the "Old Gods" are about to go to battle with the "New Gods". Here, she is portrayed as a host of the Voodoo spirit Baron Samedi.
Read more about this topic: Death: The High Cost Of Living
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)