The people you have known throughout your life will continue to live, except for those died before you did. Those who still live will continue to live until they too die. Some of them will mourn your passing more than others while they live, but things will pretty much go on as they always have.
Inventions will be invented.
Explorers will still go exploring.
Teachers will still teach.
Students will still learn.
Philosophers will still ..uhm, drink beer and waft on and on about
what it all means...
Your body will
decay. Other smaller creatures which you have ignored or been occasionally annoyed by in your life will slowly approach what's left of you and will become the caretakers of your
corpse.
Flies and other
creepycrawlies of
carrion will help your shell's mad rush towards
oblivion. They take what matter they can from your
mortal coil to keep their own bodies going, and will leave the rest for the natural tendencies of this universe to veer into
chaos when there is a lack of
order. Why chaos didn't just overtake the order of
molecular bonding inside your flesh while you lived is what most would call a
mystery. Some think they have all the answers. Some think there is no mystery; that's it's all a
cosmic coincidence.
Your
memory may or may not live on in the hearts and minds of others. That depends a lot on what you did while you lived. What happens to the rest of you? Your
inner essence? Your
soul? Well philosophers will certainly continue talking about what happens to it, if anything at all; if in fact a soul exists at all. And many of them will go on
talk show circuits, or write
books. They probably won't mention you by name, but they'll be talking about you just the same.
And wherever you go, if in fact your soul goes anywhere, chances are it won't be
anything like you can
imagine now. Why? Because despite all those
great minds talking and writing and
making money on the
idea of an
afterlife and despite the
Bible and the
Torah and the
Necronomicon and the
Apocrypha and all those books we people examine and memorize and use to verify the
existence or nonexistence of God, the fact of the matter is
we honestly don't know.
It won't matter to you any longer, either way. Either you'll have much more important and interesting things to be concerned about, or you won't notice because you'll have absolutely nothing at all to be concerned about. Either you'll have an entire new perspective of reality to explore, or you'll literally cease to exist in all true senses of the word. Either way, it's not going to hurt. Why? Your body used to tell you what hurt and what didn't, and you won't have that any more. So whether there's an afterlife or not, we know for certain
it's not going to hurt.
Those who believe fervently and zealously that there is an afterlife, and those who believe fervently and zealously that there is not an afterlife, will continue to hash it out. Perhaps someday those still living will find out the truth about death, but that would be like reading the last page of a book before you're done with the first chapter. It would
take all the fun out of it.
So when you die, don't come back and tell us all how it goes okay? It would spoil the surprise.