Did Socrates' death cause his wife to be a widow?

I'm teaching a class celled Metaphysics and Epistemology this semester. One of the books for the class is by John Carroll and Ned Markosian and it's entitled An Introduction to Metaphysics. A number of students found the example of the passage below perplexing (this appears on page 29):

"When Socrates drank the hemlock and died in the Athenian prison, his wife, Xanthippe, became a widow. Did Socrates' death cause Xanthippe to become a widow?... Many philosophers find this conclusion unacceptable. The worry is that any relation holding between these two events is bound not to be of the tangible/physical sort one normally expects causation to be. The connection seems to be too much a conceptual matter. To drive home this point, sometimes it is argued that, since Xanthippe was not in the prison with Socrates, his death could not have caused her to become a widow. She became a widow the instant he died. Since there is no instantaneous causal action at a distance in a world like ours where no signals travel faster than light, his death didn't cause her widowhood."

If I were taking the class, I'd be tempted to write one of my papers on something related to this example. There are some fascinating questions that are raised in this short passage. Can there be instantaneous causation at a distance? Does causation require a "tangible/physical" bond between two events? If she became a widow the instant he died, then what (if not his death) caused this effect?

I'm hoping readers will make some suggest some answers to these questions and shed some light on these issues.

Causes vs. Background Conditions

Consider a typical case of causation. Lucy strikes a match to light her grill. It's a beautiful sunny day and there's not a hint of wind. Not surprisingly, the match ignites and she is able to start her grill. I take it that it is the striking of the match that causes it to light.

But there are (what some might call) background conditions that are required for the match to light, like the presence of oxygen and a lack of rain and gusty winds. If the match were wet, then it wouldn't light. And if it were too windy, it wouldn't light. So here's an interesting question: Do the background conditions (also) cause the match to light? This might sound odd. We don't say things like "The striking of the match and the presence of oxygen caused the match to light."

Various theories of causation seem to entail that we should say that these background conditions count as causes (See, for example, David Lewis's view in his essay "Causation" and J.L. Mackie's view in his book The Cement of the Universe, among others). Some folks take the above to be a direct challenge to such theories while others bite the proverbial bullet and simply insist that such background conditions are indeed causes. What do you think about this?

If you think the background conditions are not causes, how exactly do you distinguish between the two and explain why these background conditions aren't causes?

If you think they are causes, then how do you explain our practice of not treating them as such? Why are so many people tempted to say that there's a metaphysical difference between causes and mere background conditions? How do you show that this is a mistake?