What we conclude
When a prior would win a vote in any room — death is bad, more years are better, grief must be heavy — it stops looking like a value and starts looking like physics. Then it prices drugs, stretches dying, and charges guilt to people who could not stop a body. Surplus empathy and trauma appear where mortality could have been named as a fact, not a scandal. Naming the tilt is not a wish that people stop mourning.
What we will not claim
We do not claim that death is good, that grief is a cognitive error, or that a nation is healthier if it shrugs at dying. We will not publish a fear-of-death ranking. Cruelty is not realism.