I have an application that displays information about people in an organization and their accomplishments in the organization. It is non-religious in nature and members can be of any or no religion.
I want to have an icon to represent that a person is deceased when a list of people is being displayed but I don't want something that would have religious connotations, so a cross or angel wings are out. Any sort of small icon that would tastefully indicate that the person is deceased would be appropriate.
Answer
Don't do it. This is not a video game (well, maybe we live in the Matrix, but still...NO). No cross cultural iconography exists, plus it would be in poor taste to use graphics even if a universal picture would be acknowledged as representative of what death is.
Do what Wikipedia does: have the date of birth and optional date of passing (avoid formulaic "date of passing: not yet" style forms). On pages where it is appropriate to call attention to the fact where someone is deceased put [deceased]...but again do not put [not dead, yet] for everyone else.
It's a sensitive issue, and only run of the mill if you work in a hospital or similar. In those clinical situations you don't want icons anyway, a check mark in a column suffices.
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