I am copying this from another thread. This is the interpretation I and several roleplayers on Baja have chosen to adopt.
I've always done the same thing; considered death to be "unconsciousness" unless there was some specific reason to treat it different. For example, on Great Lakes, one of the evil guilds is established as being extremely necromantric in nature, so their deaths are literal deaths, and their resurrections are, if not resurrections
per se, at least being put into a state of conscious undeath.
Galen, interestingly, is returned from the dead himself, through means and for a reason which were never specified. (This was a way to get around having killed him off during a period when I wasn't playing. Sadly, I lack the ability to effectively RP another character, it seems, at least to RP another character full-time.)
The implication is that in the UO universe, coming back from the dead isn't unknown, but isn't easy or common.
-Galen's player