Rabbi Harold Schulweis:

We are not to close our eyes to death. Nor are we to pretend that our grief, our mourning, our ache are all unreal. We have learned the price of such denial and evasion. The momentary relief it may bring us is followed by an overwhelming despair on the morrow. Pain, suffering, death are real. It must be confronted with emotional honesty. Beyond that, the vacuum left in the wake of our loss must be filled with a creative memory, with a remembrance which leads to activity. Death must be overcome by deeper living, fear by more courageous faith, remorse by stronger resolve.

We Jews believe in an immortality of influence. We believe that no gesture of goodness is swallowed up into oblivion. There is a conservation of moral energy wherein the quality of goodness expressed in the lives of those we remember is transformed into our own attitudes and behavior towards life. The past is not over. It flows into the present towards the dreams of the future.