Media narratives as allegories of mortality?

I’m looking for examples where the playing out of a narrative in some medium is connected to an idea of mortality.  What I mean by this is:

—something like the classic idea of 1001 Nights:  if you finish telling the story, you get executed;
—at the end of the film of Fahrenheit 451 where an old man who’s taught his grandson to memorize and recite a Dickens’s novel that ends with a deathbed scene himself dies as his grandson successfully finishes reciting the novel;
—Yuri Tsivian in his book on Russian film before the revolution notes that the ribbon of film going through a projector was memorialized in some poetry as the ribbon of life.  When the film runs out, the life runs out.

So I don’t mean something like the Ringu/Ring films where the idea is to consume media is to die.  It’s more:  once a narrative ends, life ends.

I’d especially love any example of a record (45 or 48) where the ending of the song is associated with mortality.

Thanks!

—Dana Polan
Professor
=====
General list info and FAQ: http://comm.umn.edu/~grodman/cultstud.html