3 days of silence from the landlord and now your ceiling is trying out for a pancake commercial. Nothing says "we care" like a bucket catching your dinner while you wait for a text back lol.

Wouldn't that just make you slower at finding stuff?

Had a writing professor pull the same thing on me in college, told us death equals depth and we all bought it. Killed off my main guy in a short story about a farmer and got the same reaction, readers just felt tricked instead of sad. What I learned is that a death only lands if the reader has a real reason to care first, and 20 pages usually is not enough room to build that. Your workshop was not wrong, they were picking up on a real problem, which is that the ending felt like a cheap shock instead of something earned. Next time try writing the same story without the death and see if it hits harder, because most of the time the quiet ending is the one people remember.