When I emphasize my atheist hat sometimes I say that there is indeed life after death and we know that for certain.
Meaning that there has been death, yet life goes on. We know that for certain.
Of course, talk of life after death usually involves some additional premises and expectations that are often connected to the idea of specific persons having more than one life to live. There are whole doctrines attempting to explain and predict how and presumably why that would happen. More often than not there is also some form of associated expectation of "fairness", which may be completely implicit, very explicit, passionate and elaborate, or anything in between.
Some of those doctrines propose that Earthly existence would be a transitional step to an eternal afterlife, while others propose repeated cycles of life and death on Earth for what would be in some sense the same person. Other variations also exist, but these two may be the most representative.
Myself, I think that my own skeptical statement holds true and is quite proper and sufficient. There is indeed, and very demonstrably, life after death. And there is death after that life, and so on. I am not inclined to assume or even to want anything more esoteric or miraculous to somehow happen or exist under those observable facts.
I am all too aware that many people find that unfair and in some sense insufficient. They want to believe that the same person that we see die can or even will somehow live again at least once more.
That strikes me as not only religiously unwise, but also as logically contradictory. Persons are by nature finite and ill adjusted to attempts at transcending our mortality. It is not just that our bodies age and sicken, but also that our minds and emotions are not at all well equipped to deal with significantly longer lifespans.
If anything, we may be already abusing our own abilities to cope such as they are. Mortality is a key ingredient of our most effective means of dealing with disagreements, group conflicts and ideological differences; we are simply not very good in dealing with our own history, traumas and intellectual and emotional baggage either individually or collectivelly. While the craving for history, ancestry and legacy is very much real and common, we would probably have destroyed ourselves long ago were it not for the limitations in fulfilling that craving.
The TLDR is that individual persons do indeed die and do not return to life, and that is very, very likely to be a very good thing indeed.
Incidentally, this connects to my takes on several core Buddhist concepts - Anatta, Sunyata, Anicca, Pratītyasamutpāda.
