Status: IN
Dead nodes in the gossip protocol follow a comprehensive, irreversible lifecycle with three independent safeguards: death status cannot be reversed by incoming gossip messages, dead node records are fully removed from the membership list after the cleanup interval (not merely flagged), and incoming gossip about already-dead nodes from other peers is silently filtered to prevent zombie reintroduction through stale state.
Three independent mechanisms at receive, status-transition, and cleanup stages ensure dead nodes can never be accidentally resurrected or leak membership memory.
Depends on (SL): gossip-death-is-irreversible-via-gossip, gossip-cleanup-removes-entry-entirely, gossip-dead-nodes-filtered-on-receive