Ayn Rand as a self-conscious, living person no longer exists. (For theists, try to imagine what it was like for you before you were born. You actually can't, even though you know that at some point you didn't exist. Well, that's death as well.)
Of course, as I wrote, on Rand's birthday "we celebrate her great achievements and the legacy that she left us all!" Such ocassions are for -- to use the title of Rand's great anti-communist novel -- we, the living!
Thank you for the explanation. No offense intended, but to the uninitiated the motivation sounds very similar to the old Soviet propaganda pushing the visitation of Stalin's taxidermied corpse. I guess even atheists feel a need to celebrate holy days for their saints. It must be universal.