Around 3500 years ago when our ancestors moved from their origins around  the Black Sea to conquor northern India and help spawn Veddic culture,  the burial customs were quite simple: burn the body and scatter the  ashes.

It is assumed by anthropologists who study the burial  practices of nomadic peoples that the reason for this was to keep from  tying the dead to any place, so that they either will not leave ghosts  haunting the plains, or will allow the dead to remain with the moving  living (depending on the individual anthropologists view of the dead as  either feared or loved).  In any case, when the people became settled in  India, and again during settlement periods in Germany, Scandenavia, and  the migratory waves south and west in later centuries, the customs of  barrow cremation (ashes into urns in barrows) were adopted, sometimes  progressing into ship-graves with grave goods, but in peoples like the  Angles, remaining with simple ash/urn barrow mounds.

There was  little pre-syncretic (co-existence with Christianity) speculation about  an afterlife.  It was assumed the dead were still with us, that the  spirits of the sacred ancestors watched over us.  In particular, the  Disir, the spirits of your dead mothers and maternal ancestors were  often asked for aid and intercession in life.

Death awaits all of us.  Love awaits some of us.  The latter is by far the more powerful.