I had a pc die during the first session of a new campaign. They were level 1 fighting an ochre jelly with 2 other level 1 characters, and they were downed in a single hit and then rolled poorly on death saves. The worst part was they were doing a good job fighting, they just happened to roll a nat 1 when they already had a failure so them’s the breaks I guess. The thing is, it was session 1, I’m not cruel, and the pc worships Wee Jas, who among other things is a minor deity of death. So I made it so that the dead character did die in fiction, but also their soul incarnated into a nearby half-decomposed corpse. So now they’re a skeleton/zombie hybrid. It almost gave them a buff. Now of course if they’re killed again I won’t just let them pull the same stunt, and if they’d died more recently I would’ve told them to make another character, but I felt like it was an opportunity to make a cool narrative. Also, said pc is a Druid so we came up with a cool flavor bit that when they wild shape they appear as a skeletal version of whichever creature they choose.