In the penultimate chapter of Works of Love, Kierkegaard claims that we can gauge whether someone loves properly based on how they "recollect the one who is dead" (WL, 347). Kierkegaard scholars have interpreted this peculiar association between recollecting the dead and proper love (i.e., neighborly love) by showing how the task of recollecting a dead person—that is, someone who is stripped of their corporeal qualities that facilitate attraction and self-serving relationships—enables us to appreciate the way the ideal of neighborly love is non-preferential and non-reciprocal (Søltoft, 1998; Keeley, 1999; Marino, 2024). In opposition to the prevailing interpretation, I argue that "recollecting the one who is dead" qua neighbour is an insufficient condition for engendering neighbourly love. That is because the abstract concept of "neighbour," which is the proper object of recollection, is heterogeneous with the actual person that we are commanded to love. Recollecting the dead person reveals our ideological commitments to neighborly love while simultaneously emphasizing our inability to love in accordance with those ideals. My argument focuses on the function of "recollecting the one who is dead" in the broader context of Works of Love. I argue that Kierkegaard anticipates his reader will undergo "self-denial" through proper recollection—that is, recognizing they are inherently compromised in their capacity to preserve the abstract concept of neighbour, which is derived through "recollecting the one who is dead," when trying to love an actual person. As we see in Works of Love's final chapter, self-denial is characterized as a precondition for receiving God's sanctifying grace, which assists in loving others properly (WL, 362-363). The sanctifying power of grace explains why confronting our inherent limitations is productive rather than debilitating, as Kierkegaard argues that we are capable of continuously improving our capacity to love others through self-denial.