Death's New Year

            It’s New Year’s Eve, and a very sad and intoxicated Katrina Bergman stumbles around a cemetery mourning the fourth anniversary of her late husband’s death.  Katrina encounters another mourner, a man named Thomas, who prevents her from driving drunk and attempts to help her get home.  Katrina misinterprets his good intentions and flees the man, only to end up wandering into a street and being struck by a car just before the clock strikes midnight.

            Katrina wakes to find a kind elderly face looking down at her.  The man helps her up and tells her that he is, or rather was, Thomas’ father.  He says his name is Richard, but now Katrina can call him by his formal title, Death.  Richard explains that the last person to die each year must assume the responsibilities of death for the following year.  Katrina hesitantly accepts and is apprehensive throughout a night of tutelage from the experienced reaper.  Only when he disappears at daybreak does it really set in that Katrina must spend a year collecting souls.

            What begins as a bleak and heartbreaking task becomes more and more positive as Katrina finds ways to help people pass into their different afterlives.  She finds that she learns a lot from the newly deceased, but where she will go when the year ends remains a mystery.  As the year comes to a close, she finds that she will miss her job, and she makes sure to train the newcomer very well.  When dawn comes, her replacement is suddenly unable to see her, and Katrina wonders what’s next.  Then the door opens and Richard escorts her out of her carriage into a special area of the afterlife reserved for servants of eternity.  There’s someone that very much wants to see her, says Richard.  Sure enough, there he is… four years after finishing his stint as death… her late husband.

            Based on an ancient Swedish folktale.