The first attack of the campaign killed one of my players
The very first attack landed by a monster, was a crit, killed one of my players and Im not sure how to use it as a story beat going forward. They're a group of 4 mostly inexperienced players but there was nothing they did wrong. The dice simply decided our Tortle Cleric must die. No one else has healing, no one could reach his body in time. Especially after his first death saving throw was a Nat 1 that happened immediately in turn order after getting his neck snapped. One more round, one more death saving throw and he just dies.
At the time I was dumbstruck, figured just have his God revive him and deal with the consequences later. Well now is later, we're having session 2 at level 2 in a couple days and I'm trying to come up with a way to "punish" his character for dying. His character is unaware of which God he is pledged to, discovering that is a part of his journey. His dying words were literally "MY LETTUCE" as his personal bag of lettuce drifted off into the ocean (he died on a beach). He was killed by an Octopus.
I'm not taking any liberty away from him as a player so I don't want to mess with his spells or subclass, just some kind of ongoing condition that will occasionally be relevant enough to serve as a reminder. As of right now I'm leaning towards actually tying his life to the Lettuce he arbitrarily decided was his characters thing, after I described him coming out of his shell munching on a piece of lettuce. Or giving his character trauma, a fear of octopi and just bring them back to haunt him occasionally. The other players decided to harvest all 8 of its arms after finally killing it for some completely unknown reason as well.
I'm not a very experienced dm, so I was wondering how some of you would go about your player literally dying to the first hit of entire campaign. And any ideas as to how I should navigate his character going forward would be greatly appreciated. Almost anything interesting, with large or small effects would be fine, my limit is taking any power or choice away from my player. Cheers for reading this and any responses I might get