That’s right, Max. As you say, there’s indeed a profound tendency among English speakers to use “has died” instead of the more accurate—and more blunt—“is dead.” I think this is one of the language legacies of Christian belief, which as you know has been predominant in most of the English-speaking countries for centuries now. That belief, of course, holds that death is not the end but simply a transition from mortal life to eternal life. For that reason, Christians and the faithful of their allied religions tend to think of death in the present perfect instead of the past perfect or simple declarative—someone “has died” instead of “had died” or the more blunt “is dead.” The expectation of resurrection to an after-life is so strong that Christian believers couldn’t think or speak of dying as the final solution that it is, scientifically speaking.
Among English speakers, of course, the vocabulary and language for death is strongly euphemistic and present-perfectyish to begin with. In refined or polite society, in fact, no one is dead except when the death is accidental or violently instantaneous; instead, the deceased simply “has passed away” or, in the literary sense that now sounds archaic, “has gone to the Great Beyond.” In our own Tagalog, this euphemistic tendency similarly finds expression in “sumakabilang buhay na” (literally “has gone over to the other life”) instead of the plain “namatay na” ("dead now"). And, of course, obituaries in English-language newspapers talk not of someone as “dead” plain and simple; the deceased simply “has returned to the fold/bosom of the Lord” or “has been called back to the Lord’s Kingdom.”
To sum up, death in English—as you have observed—is hardly ever a thing of the past but largely a present-perfect thing.
