4 ideas
Three sixth-grade boys in Japan, after one attends his grandmother's funeral, decide to watch a solitary, neglected old man so they can see what death looks like. He catches them, and the surveillance turns into chores and visits: they clean up his yard, plant flowers, and listen to his war memories. Over one summer he revives, and when he dies they grieve him as a friend rather than observing him as a specimen.
The boys' attention, though morbid in motive, is the first sustained attention the old man has had in years, and it changes his behavior. He starts cleaning, cooking, and caring about his home. Isolation, not age, was producing his decline, and being noticed by anyone, for any reason, gives him a reason to keep up appearances and then to live.
Detached curiosity about a stranger cannot survive repeated close contact, because proximity supplies particulars such as a name, a history and habits. Particulars make the person impossible to treat as an abstraction. The boys never decide to befriend the old man; the observing itself does it, since sustained looking at a real person turns the object of study into someone you are responsible for.
The boys' dread of death comes from its abstractness, a void with no face. After the old man dies, death becomes a place where someone they know and love has gone. That personal connection turns terror into something closer to companionship and acceptance. Fear of death is reduced less by explanation than by attachment to someone on the other side of it.