On the surface, Christina Applegate ’s first big movie, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead , and her final acting project, Dead to Me , have a thematic connection: In each, a woman must deal with unexpected death, and handle, quite frankly, a lot of dead bodies. In both, Applegate’s characters — one a teenage girl trying to feed a pack of siblings, the other a middle-aged mother raising two sons — rise to the occasion, and do whatever is necessary to protect their families. In both, arguably,