I've remade Graves from the OpenBlocks mod in Vanilla Minecraft. When you die, instead of your items going all over the place and potentially burning or despawning, they get stashed into a Grave. When you come back and break the grave block, you get your items back. This is an amazing block that really should be a part of Minecraft - having to trek back is punishing enough without your items despawning.

This is a command block invention for Vanilla Minecraft 1.8.*, and you can get it either by downloading an MCEdit schematic file or by pasting one command into a command block.

Once you have the device in your world, press the button under the "Install" sign, and you should start getting graves when you die.

I haven't tested it very thoroughly for different cases, especially multiplayer. It should work, but YMMV.

To download the "one command" version, click here.