@slubwama, capturing free-text cause of death generally makes sense to me. I would suggest that you create a ticket for adding this to the openmrs-core data model, so that we eventually get this in there.
If this will get implemented in the next planned refapp version, and thus should be able to use the next platform release, we’d just handle it that way.
Or do you need to make it run on the current platform, prior to adding this to the core data model?