Probably it'd be a good idea to discuss Death, and why it's irrelevant about what we say, after someone dies.
By the time I was 25 years old, I'd already gone through what people in later middle age are enduring; the deaths of parents and siblings. By the time I was 40, I was the last one left, out of what had once been a very large family.
First of all, Death comes to us all, sometimes at the most inconvenient time; It comes, and nothing can be done about it.
Second of all, Death happens more by random chance than any other reason; true, if one's pretty old, the likelihood's stronger, or if one's in bad health, the likelihood's stronger. However, there's plenty of ancient people who live to be even more ancient, and there's plenty of ill people who live longer than healthy people.
Death just happens, and there isn't a damned thing one can do about it, other than remembering a promise of God, that "the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, and we shall be saved....."
Death doesn't "pick on" us. I remember many frustrating discussions with a late sister, who whined that the family had been born under an "unlucky star," given its mortality. She could never understand. It just happens, and one needs to accept, adapt, and move on. I never considered my family particularly ill-blessed, onslaughted by tragedy; in fact, I rather considered destiny had treated all of us well, thank you.
Death separates from this time and place; we, the temporarily living, have no idea what it's like in Eternal Life, because finite minds cannot comprehend the Infinite, i.e., God and Eternity. We have no idea, absolutely no idea, what those who've gone before us now know. All we know is that God is powerful, glorious, majestic, and compassionate, and disposes of things the way they need disposed.
Whatever it is Hell is, and we have no way of knowing, and who's going there and who's not, is outside the realm of our understanding and experience. None of us can say who's saved and who's not; that's something that's known only between God and the individual.
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And so we come to this issue, talking about the dead, either respectfully or unrespectfully.
No matter what good one says about the dead, it doesn't do the dead any good.
No matter what bad one says about the dead, it doesn't harm the dead in the least little way.
