I was in a frame of mind to read this post. I'm a little older than you and the poignancy of 'memories dying' in the sense you mean is sharp. It's not just people, as you say, but places. I write often here about my childhood days in the country, traipsing around the forest behind my house. But when I look at Google Maps, that place is not really there anymore. The hill I played on, that was little past stream I could see from my bedroom window--that hill is gone. Gouged and replanted with trailer homes. There are new neighbors all along our 'country' road. We used to have a rural free district address. Now there are numbers on the houses.

Eastern tradition keeps the memory of people and events alive merely through the act of recalling them. In more primitive cultures, the past is not mowed over but revered in oral narratives. Memories in those cultures die more slowly and morph into something that perhaps never was.

But still, memories eventually do die.

You see, I was in a mood for this piece ;) Nicely done.