All I can say man, is that that's a very metaphysical question that I can't answer without verging on blasphemy.
But, I'll do my best.
I think a good starting point for you: google quantum immortality.
The notion that science could discern the will of the creator is laughable, so "scientific results" about things like this are... ridiculous. BUT--based on theoretical physics and philosophical reductions, a "theory" gaining steam is that life is unique to the person experiencing it, and because it is (as far as anyone knows) impossible to "experience" nothing, each individual is--in essence--God, experiencing life as a material being. Which is what Jesus said, 2000 years ago.
So no one individual can experience their own death, but each individual can experience everyone else's death. IE, if you put a shotgun in your mouth and pulled the trigger with your toe.. in your reality, it would jam, it would misfire, it would go off but take off half your face and leave you alive... whichever scenario results in you living, would occur. But for everyone else on the planet, you would die right there and then.
Now, as a person's life goes on, the experience needs to get increasingly more... random... or fantastical... to keep their time line going. Which may account for things like the Mandella effect. So, let's say, in your time line you try to pull that shotgun trigger and it doesn't go off. Maybe for it to be defective, a person at the manufacturing plant needed to be sick that day, so maybe they had to go to the funeral for the guy who wrote the berenstein bears, but in order for him to be at that funeral in your timeline, fewer copies of those books needed to be sold for him to have a funeral at a place and cost that's affordable for him to go, so your universe is retconned to be a universe where they were the "berenstain bears" and a publishing deal was slightly less lucrative. Or something along those lines.
Eventually, as your life becomes increasingly more improbable, you realize that you are, in fact god, you break the machine, the illusion, the maya, and you regain your true form, and come back to do it again, in a new form, forgetting it all over again so you can experience life, eternally.
And because each individual view point is a view point of god, all of these infinite timelines are occurring simultaneously, we're ALL god (as jesus, again, said) and the experience of one is impossible to parse out from the experience of another. And so YES, Kobe is still alive in his timeline, but you might not be alive in his. And his may have branched off from yours 40 years ago, because in his, maybe he doesn't need to BE the Kobe that you needed him to be. Because there "IS" no Kobe, just your view of an energy collected as "Kobe" so you can learn whatever lesson you need to from his life/death.
Like I said man, tough to answer without passing the peace pipe and being face to face.
fukking idiot.
