what do you do when the number of dead citizens outnumber the number of living citizens?
What methods do you use to dispose of the dead?
Long before the current version, one of my earlier forts had a serious problem, after a technically successful attempt to counter-attack and break a siege went quite badly. At one point I was down to two or three functioning dwarves, all of them on the ragged edge of insanity and only cheering up when they snapped for a moment and smashed something. I had resigned myself to seeing the fort to crumble to its end at any moment, but migrants showed up suddenly and saved the fort.
The first order of the migrants was building coffins, digging tombs, building doors, and hauling stuff (especially corpses). Once the danger had passed, I decided that in memory of those hard times, going forward no adult dwarf (immigrant or recently grown up) would become a "true citizen" until they had carved a coffin with their own hands, dug out a few squares of tomb, and carried their own coffin to put it in place. "Being a Dwarf on the frontier means living life knowing you could die at any moment, and having a tomb carved out of the living rock open and ready for you when your time comes." (As a side effect, everyone naturally ended up with a few points of masonry and mining in case of emergencies.)
The extensive tomb quarter of that fort was far from the elaborate vaulted halls full of fine engravings and sculpture I've created in other forts; but it was *personal*. No matter how many gold statues and gem-encrusted cabinets you had earned over the years, sitting at the center of all that opulence in your tomb was the crude stone coffin you had hacked out with your own hands at the very beginning of your journey as a Dwarf, waiting for you to finish the cycle.