game crashes and I'm dead

[forteantimes23 5]

This other player approaches me the whole game freezes and then crashes I log back in and I'm dead. Is this a normal thing? 

[drgullen 597]

For whatever reason, the client (your game) froze, but the server still registers your character as being "in the world" at that moment, so yeah, while you were frozen, the guy killed your character most likely.  If nobody else had been there, you'd have been more or less in the same spot as you were when your game froze when you logged back in.