What Ed's saying is, yeah, the death system is a very IC thing. On that token, while you're recovering from death, we mechanically represent the effect by making your character look "ghostly." Really, though, your character isn't ghostly at all, but hagard, like he's just had the tar beat out of him/her (which was likely the case), or sickly, drained. Your character feels awful, in all senses of the word, until he/she has recovered, either by giving the body the time to work it out on its own, or by making the "spiritual" connection to the place of death. By all means, play out your character's distress during times of recovery, and the depth of meaning in returning to the site of your character's death. Death is no light thing, afterall, despite how seemingly trivial a video game can make it seem.