For me, Death comes up when there is something that is drawing to an inevitable conclusion - it NEEDS to end, as Babs said - but it's not necessarily something that is going to be a fun and easy time. Death is like a metamorphosis, in that it requires losing a comfortable inertia (life) in favor of a period of growth (rebirth). Sometimes I see Death as having an element of choice, but often times it's something that is going to happen whether we like it or not, and we often don't, because it's hard to embrace the uncertainty of rebirth over the certainty of the present.
So yes, a valid reading of that card is that there's a resistance to a change that must - and will - come. Perhaps the point of no return hasn't arrived yet, but it will. Death, like taxes, is inevitable in the end, but it doesn't have to be cataclysmic in the way that, say, the Tower would suggest, if the person in that situation embraces the inevitable change.