In the case of our family and personal friends, we rehearse our memories of them, we cherish objects associated with them. Poe was an alcoholic who had led an unhappy, dissolute life. Perhaps Poe himself might have preferred to survive in some other guise, but we do not memorialize the dead in answer to their wishes. The himself that history makes of him is a function of his public image. It is subject to modification, but the dead person himself is no longer in control of this modification.
Death is a fact of life for all higher animals.
Poe is a name , a proper noun . If we honor the dead, it is because death is a moment of crisis, when the referent of a public meaning, a proper name, is no longer directly available. What we fear is not the mere fact of death itself, but the extinction of a communally agreed-upon meaning. Death is the sign of a violence perpetrated against the community. What I mean to others.