Context is everything.
Death is inarguably a bad thing… but is inspiring if someone dies heroically. Death is a good thing… if it ends suffering… or is the end of a wicked life. Death is amusing… if uneventful and inconsequential.
We dream and daydream. What we imagine is our reality on the inside. We turn it into stories with words and images.
Death is a major theme in our fiction. It is the thrill of the horror and action-adventure genres alike. It is the sadness of a drama or the tragedy of a love story.
The significance of a death is the life that is ending.
People perish in droves and their demise is but a headline or a statistic. One person dies and everyone mourns. WHO dies is most important. WHY and HOW are secondary.
If a cause of death is impersonal, then it is either a simple misfortune or the victim is a nonentity. It must be personal to be significant. It is meaningless otherwise.
The people involved are what give a situation context.
Their will and actions are the cause and effect. The situation is a
happenstance otherwise, even if death.
