The Name is used on cards that this card is linked to. Thus, it's probably a good idea to remove links to this card before changing the name.
The Birth and Death Dates and Places are just text fields. It would have been nice to always convert dates to long format (Monday, October 12, 1987), but the Macintosh can only handle dates in that format back to January 1, 1904.
By clicking on the word 'Died', you change it to 'Alive as of'.