What to do if someone dies?

If someone dies in my town, what should I do?
Do I need a cemetery or a chapel?

Do I need them BEFORE someone dies or can I build it after the first citizen died?

Solution 1:

Cemeteries prevent citizens from being sad when a member of their family dies. One citizen dying does not have a huge effect on overall population happiness (I believe that their spouse and children will suffer a big loss of happiness, which slowly recovers, but the rest of the population continues as normal) so it really is up to you when you build your cemetery.

Chapels raise population happiness (up to 200 citizens) in general, regardless of deaths.

Solution 2:

This depends on what the reason for said person to die is. If the person dies of old age or some of the other benign reasons you should only make sure that the now dead worker is replaced. Either by always having enough laborers to replace dying persons automatically or by increasing the amount of works for said task manually.

If the death is caused by one of the games more pressing dangers such as starving, cold or disease you need to take action to make sure that more people do not die.

Regarding the cemetery the effect of not having a cemetery is that "they’ll be much sadder for a while, but they’ll head back toward normal happiness after a few years."

Solution 3:

A graveyard will only be used to bury people after it was build. Any people which died before the graveyard is completed or which dies while all available graveyards are full will not be buried.

A chapel is not required for burying people.