Alrighty, bear ... bare ..? Hang with me on this one. This is only my belief so take it for what it is.

Death starts before we're actually "dead". Our mind begins to fall inward and we lose consciousness. It collapses inward through several levels and we begin to perceive different things; colors, smoke (it looks like a fog) until finally we emerge and perceive a brilliant and calm white light. At this point our mind is leaving our body following what are known as the "red and white drops". This whole process can take up to a week or more depending on our attachment.

As our mind leaves the body, the perception of the light changes. We're now all dead (as opposed to mostly dead ... ... ten points to whoever gets that reference). Depending on our mental state at death we enter into what can best be described as a dream-like state. In this dream-like state we can feel like we are drifting upward, helped upward by unseen hands. It can be a very peaceful and lovely experience.

Within about 40 days our mind will feel pulled toward it's next state, possibly human or a heaven-like state, maybe a chihuahua or worse.

Since "we" don't really exist at that point, none of this is remembered. The mind is like a CPU for a computer. "We" are merely a perception on a collection of causes and conditions so one shouldn't think of this as the "us" we know being reborn. It doesn't remember anything it only processes the data. Our brain is the hard-drive that stores the data.

So once our mind is pulled to our next parents; a human mom and dad or two cardinals or whatever, our mind enters the fetus at conception and we're off to another life.

That quite frankly, sucks.