Is there a more active way to indicate that a node expects to die? Say, a shutdown handler that manually evicts itself from the cluster with a last, 'I'm dead' state. Would this be useful?
Despite what the sibling commenter claims, in a production system you absolutely need that distinction -- not in terms of the reliability of the low-level protocol, but in terms of the application features you want to expose. A node about to be removed needs a chance to drain active connections.