In Joyce's "The Dead," who are the dead of the title?

The place to look at is the end of this amazing story that
so powerfully introduces ideas of mortality and our own ephemeral nature as human
beings. Having been told the story of Michael Furey by his wife, Gretta, and his tragic
end, he comes to contemplate the way in which his Aunt Julia is going to be numbered
among the dead soon, which in turn leads him to realise the way in which they are all
slowly but surely dying:

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One by one they were all becoming shades... His
soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious
of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity
was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had
one time reared and lived in was dissolving and
dwindling.

Note the way in
which Gabriel Conroy at this point in the novel feels the way in which he too is heading
to becoming one of the "vast hosts of the dead." As the story ends, the snow starts once
again, falling on both the "living and the dead," uniting them together in a condition
of paralysis that has been exhibited by Gabriel throughout the
story.

Thus the title of this excellent short story draws
our attention to our own mortality but also the way in which we live our lives. Gabriel
Conroy is forced to realise how he has been living as if he were dead, in a state of
constant paralysis, but as the story ends and after finding out about Michael Furey, he
believes that it is better to "pass boldly into that other world" than to slowly dwindle
away his life. The title then stands as a challenge to us as to how we live the few days
that we are given before we die.