By that standard, we should purge our speaking of any and all allusions to traumatic death, i.e. the overwhelming majority of death. I would judge this to be an unreasonable standard; trigger warnings are a good thing when possible, but they are not practical for casual, conversational speech.

This particular case may also be a form of unusually high sensitivity, unless the loss was recent (or particularly traumatic for other reasons, e.g. happened during childhood or the woman nearly died in the fire herself). I lost the majority of my family to various forms of cancer, and nearly everyone I know has had at least one such event, but I still remember "I hope the bastard gets bowel cancer" or similar phrases being a fairly common choice for an extremely venomous insult, and it wouldn't cause so much as a raised eyebrow unless someone's relative were in the process of dying of cancer, or had very recently done so.