Interestingly, in Germany at least, when someone is killed in an accident, in determining the damages payable to the person's estate (i.e. other people) they take account of how much pain (it is speculated that) the person suffered in the seconds before they died. To me this seems ... weird. I don't think they're worried about psychological trauma in the afterlife, but who knows?
For an extra level of weirdness, imagine the person who caused the accident collecting the damages. It's not very improbable: you could be driving a car with your parents as passengers and you crash it, through honest incompetence, without committing a criminal offence, and they die, painfully, while you survive. Your insurance pays money into the estate for the pain your parents suffered, and you then collect that money, minus inheritance tax. By adding to your feelings of guilt, perhaps it's a fair punishment?
You're feelings of guilt have nothing to do with externally imposed punishment. Everybody is going to react differently. Since will feel tremendous guilt and some won't. Even if they do, some will handle it well and some won't. It's not an effective way to mete out punishment.
The world is senseless enough already. (I believe) the best we can do as humans is to try to make it a little more fair, which means connecting negative effects to negative causes. And when we do the opposite, we build systems that sow chaos. To that end, I have to say I'm actually philosophically offended by your suggestion.
Separate note. Don't make the mistake of thinking meaning and life are binary. People too often think life is meaningful (everything is eternally meaningful) or completely meaningless. Allow that neither of those are true, and that all things carry some meaning for some amount of time.
If that were the reason, then surely the compensation ought to be paid directly to the lover or lovers rather than to the estate of the person who died, who might have left their money to charity, not to the lover or lovers. They almost certainly do have mechanisms in place for compensating family members directly, but compensation for pain suffered in the seconds before death goes to the estate of the dead person, not to the family, if what I read was accurate and still applies. That compensation is presumably independent of whether the deceased had any family and independent of who inherits it.
If a type of accident is usually going to cause horrible pain if it causes death, this creates a bigger incentive to avoid serious injury in the first place (which also helps avoid death from those injuries).
If suffering is taken into account for injury, also taking it into account for death avoids situations where it would be preferable for the perpetrator to cause death rather than have the victim survive in pain. There's no threshold because the fatality is considered in addition to rather than instead of the suffering.
