An afterlife implys a consciousness that survives the body, so implies a consciousness that preceeds the body. Of course, that automatically opens the question of reincarnation.
And that means that cockroach you just stepped on may have been a politician in a prior life. 
mmmmm..very interesting question indeed.
To illustrate why this is vital in answering your questions, think of spatial variability, with a tabletop as a plane and you as a volumetric being (two variables spatially as opposed to three variables spatially): you can gaze at any point upon the tabletop from your 'greater' perspective spatially, but someone confined to the tabletop (as a planar being of only two variable expressions of space, linear and planar) cannot accomplish this perception.
Perhaps Time has similar variable expressions and we are limited at present in our understanding because we assume a 'planar' limit to Time. Did you know that you experience nothing in the present of the phenomenon, only as a receiver of the data and thus experiencing an event 'after the fact' while the source of the phenomenon is beyond the temporal moment of the phenomenon's original 'output'. Starlight is a nice example of this reality. Perhaps our 'planar' temporal existence is not capable of experiencing 'volumetric' temporal data but we can receive 'linear' temporal data (as in past having a linear characteristic).