The player loses all spells when resurrected
In the original Morrowind engine, it's possible to resurrect yourself when you die. Click on "No" when asked if you want to load a previous save, then open up the console, type in "player->resurrect", close the console, press escape to close the main menu and then right click to resume the game. You won't lose any of your spells by resurrecting yourself like this.
In OpenMW 0.46, you can follow the same steps, but you won't need to right click at the end (which is fine) and you'll lose all of your spells (which is not).
This spell loss would naturally be more of a problem on multiplayer servers where players are supposed to be resurrected when they die.