Death: The Time of Your Life

I started reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman toward the end of high school and built up my collection over the first few years of college.  But it took me a bit longer to get around to the spin-offs.  With Death: The Time of Your Life, I finally managed to finish this collection.  There's a nice sense of completion that comes with that.

This graphic novel picks up with Foxglove and Hazel, who were first introduced in A Game of You.  They lived upstairs from Barbie, the central character in that arc. Though Foxglove previously appeared off-page in the first arc, Preludes and Nocturnes, when her ex-girlfriend calls her in an attempt to get back together.

In A Game of You, Hazel discovers she is pregnant, which she's a bit amazed by.  Yes, she had sex with a man, but she was told that if you do it standing up, you can't get pregnant.  Hazel's not the brightest person. Foxglove agrees to stay with her and try to work things out, though.

Death: The Time of Your Life takes place after Hazel's son, Alvie is born. Foxglove is a rock star and Hazel's a stay-at-home mom masquerading as Foxglove's secretary because her manager wants to keep her in the closet so the teen-aged boys keep buying her albums.

Early on, Alvie dies of SIDS, but Hazel strikes a deal with Death.  If she would let Alvie live a little longer, so the three of them can have a bit more time as a family, then when his time came up again either Hazel or Foxglove would agree to take his place.  Foxglove doesn't believe this when Hazel tells her and their relationship starts to fall apart.

It doesn't take long for Alvie to crawl out on the balcony and fall two stories to the concrete driveway.  The debt comes due and Foxglove finds herself forced to choose between her family and her career. Does she ignore it all, losing Hazel and Alvie in the process?  Does she sacrifice herself so one of them can live?

The story isn't much more than a musing on the choices we make and how each one requires us to sacrifice something. It's a short tale, perhaps not my favorite of the Sandman series, but it was nice to get some closure on Foxglove and Hazel. I'm glad I know where they ended up.

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