Your mental model is correct, but there's a matter of orders of magnitude, as I explained above. A standard incandescent lightbulb isn't going to light up until you have tens or hundreds of milliamps going through it, so it's possible it could still be dark at a current where you would be dead. At the microamp levels you'll actually see in this situation, you might be able to get an NE-2 neon bulb to light up. (Don't forget the ballast resistor.)