Simple Restart not working

So I have a game, and made it so if you die a death menu pops up that allows you to restart. Now I've done this before and it's very easy. I just use this line of code:

  public void restart()
     {
         SceneManager.LoadScene(SceneManager.GetActiveScene().buildIndex);
     }

I hooked that up to a button, but now for some reason, every time I press it, it restarts the scene but it restarts it with my player character in a completely different state than it should be. For some reason, my player character starts the next scene already dead if I press restart. That basically makes the game unplayable and it's really frustrating. Is there some other more advanced way to restart a scene? (I'm still pretty new to all of this.)