My grandmother said goodbye to me in a dream as she was going.  I woke up from the dream to find that my mom had found her dead in bed when she went to wake her to leave on the trip to take her home.  

I also believe that there's certainly some way that the dead live on.  To me, at the very least, the actions they took while they were alive 1) irrevocably affected the course of history and 2) live on in our memories.  A more spiritual way of saying this is...