Some might think that it is a pronouncement of death by a medical professional that means someone is truly without life. A doctor's declaration does not make someone dead (metaphysically) or prove that they are (epistemologically); the doctor would only be right if the person they are speaking of is already dead. What, then, is biological death? It is the cessation of life for the body. Whether biological and true death are the same depends on whether there is any sort of afterlife. The death of the brain would not by necessity have to be the same as the death of consciousness (though consciousness is Biblically asleep until the resurrection [1]), with some saying they had out-of-body experiences or exposure to an afterlife after clinical or full death before resuscitation.
As for near-death experiences, they are claimed by some to occur strictly within the scope of clinical death instead of total biological death, the point past which resuscitation is supposed to be scientifically impossible, though there are reports with multiple alleged witnesses testifying that various people were dead or at least clinically dead for much longer than the usual duration before being revived. Furthermore, some cases are reported by witnesses and the revived person themself to involved the latter coming back from a near-death experience having perceived things they could not have perceived through the bodily senses.
One could never know from hearsay or even memories of one's own near-death experience(s) before being revived (from biological death or from something else, one could not truly know) whether these perceptions are false memories, hallucinations when a person is really awake with active senses, purely inward mental experiences during physically traumatic events, or actual glimpses of an afterlife. Are near-death experiences during clinical death just dreams or maybe, in some scenarios, even waking hallucinations of atypical imagery?
This would be consistent with the diversity of supposed afterlife accounts. However, it is also logically possible that if there is an afterlife, not everyone receives one or that it is different from person to person, as none of this would contradict the self-necessary truths of logical axioms. When one's basic, everyday sensory perceptions are already epistemologically up in the air, of course the diverse range of near-death or potentially real afterlife experiences claimed to have been faced by different people (not that other minds can even be proven to exist [2]) are even more far removed from our capacity to prove.
Whether or not Christianity's soul sleep and resurrection to eventual annihilation or eternal bliss is true, it is also logically possible that near-death experiences are mental constructs during clinical rather than biological death. The only way to know is to be omniscient, or at least have certain epistemological limitations lifted, or to die and then have epistemological barriers taken away. After all, if one still cannot prove if what the majority of the senses perceive is within one's mind or in alignment with an external world of matter or an afterlife, not even dying and entering a genuine afterlife would allow a person to know this is what they are experiencing.
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