Well, they wished him back without any trouble--and that's what I was thinking, actually. He was able to come back for the brief time he had left to live out, even though he'd been killed by something like grief.Dark Red Z wrote:I understand natural causes basically as dying on your bed. Like Goku here, or Namekusei's Patriatch.
In real life, we define things as natural causes or non-natural causes because, in medicine, it's convenient that way, but it doesn't go much deeper than that. Philosophically, a lot of things medicine considers natural aren't much different from a lot of things they consider unnatural. To make matters less straight forward, in Dragon Ball people apparently do have these destined lifespans, like the Namekian elder's, which was apparently just a little bit longer than when he died from grief. Such a lifespan obviously doesn't exist in real life--not to our knowledge, at least--so the definitions of natural and unnatural can't take them into account.
It's all pretty interesting to think about. I'm curious about what Toriyama had in mind when he wrote it. Does "death by natural causes" mean the same thing in Japanese medicine as in western medicine, and if so, was he even using the medical definition?