Game Nostalgia - First PC Death

I am thinking back to the first character that I ever lost in an RPG, campaign death not withstanding. The game was Legend of the Five Rings, Second Edition (and yes, I must qualify that) and the character was a young Lion tactician hoping to make his name among an empire emerging from the Scorpion Clan Coup. What followed was a horrific foray into the Clan Wars, a time of great strife and evil as Fu Leng made his move to cast the empire into the 1000 Years of Darkness. The young Ikoma bravely fought alongside his campaigns until that fateful moment: exposure to the Wasting Disease. After much suffering (and 16 failed dice rolls), his life came to an end, as his unsteady hand during his final act of seppukku was met with the honorable duty of his second. The character was burned and buried in a tender bonding moment among the PCs before they had to move on in order to warn the empire of the approaching Crab/Shadowlands army. The back-up character, the Kitsu Shugenja, really never meshed with the group, and eventually, succumbed to the seductive evils of maho.

Lessons
The lessons that I took away from the event were quite simple:

1. When it counts, I will fail the roll that will be needed to save my character...or in this instance, all 16 rolls.
2. Character death can be a wonderful story point to bring the others together, but it is often trivialized in many RPGs.
3. The second character will never have the same impact on the story as the first. He/she will undoubtedly feel out of place and isolated from the rest of the group, possibly because he/she was never part of the bonding moment.

While I have had many characters suffer horrible deaths, none stick in mind more than this young samurai hoping to leave his mark on the empire.

(The second most memorable death resulted in an awesomely gruesome display in Call of Cthulhu, but this story should be saved for another day.