The afterlife is existence believed to follow death. Whatever comes next, if anything does.
Almost every religion has a version, and English carries the vocabulary of several — heaven, hell, paradise, reincarnation. The word itself is neutral and does not commit to any of them, which is why it suits writing about belief generally. It is normally used with the. There is a lighter figurative sense about second careers, since a building or a television programme can have an afterlife in another form.
Proto-Indo-European
*leyp-
Middle English
lyf
English
life
English, today
afterlife
Built from
From after + life. life comes from Middle English lyf. From Middle English lyf, from Old English līf, from Proto-West Germanic līb, from Proto-Germanic lībą (“life, body”), from lībaną (“to remain, stay, be left”), from Proto-Indo-European leyp- (“to stick, glue”). Cognate with Scots life, leif (“life”), stq Lieuw (“body”), West Frisian liif (“body”), cim laip (“body”), Dutch lijf (“body”) and leven (“life”), German Leib (“body; womb”) and Leben (“life”), Low German Lief (“body; life”), lb Leif, Läif (“body”), wym łaowa (“life”), Yiddish לײַב (“body”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish liv (“life; waist”), Faroese lív (“life”), Icelandic líf (“life”). Related to belive.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA