An armoured figure rides a white horse past a king, a bishop and a child. Far off, the sun rises between two towers. This is the most misread card in the deck, and it very rarely means someone dies.
Death usually marks a period genuinely ending. A relationship closes, a job ends, something you believed for years stops fitting. What makes it frightening is not that it is bad but that it does not reverse. This is not improvement, it is termination.
What matters is that the ending has usually already happened. People draw this and ask what is going to end; more often they are refusing to admit what already did. The relationship kept in form after the feeling left. The job you know is wrong and keep showing up to.
Reversed, that admission is being postponed. Holding a finished thing keeps the next one from arriving. That is why the sunrise sits in the background — morning in this card only comes after. The single piece of homework here is writing down, in one line, what has already ended.
Reading Death as literal death is almost always a misread. What it marks is an ending that cannot be reversed, and the subject is usually a relationship, a job or a period of life. It is treated as the frightening card while in practice it shows up more often where something is being dragged out. Admitting it is over is what makes this card easier.
With the World, a period closes properly. With the Devil, you know it should end and you are not ending it. Death says irreversible, not bad.