A burial in Königsberg, February 1804, and Job 14:14

"It was still brutally cold on the day of the funeral [February 28, 1804]; but, as winter days in Königsberg often could be, it was also beautifully bright and clear. Scheffner [his oldest surviving friend] wrote about a month later to a friend:

'You will not believe the kind of tremor that shook my entire existence when the first clumps of earth were thrown on the coffin -- my head and heart still tremble...'

It was not just the cold that made Scheffner shiver. Nor was it simply the fear of his own death....The tremor that would reverberate in his head for days and weeks had deeper causes. Kant, the man, was gone forever. The world was cold, and there was no hope -- not for Kant, and perhaps not for any of us. Scheffner was only too much aware of Kant's belief that there was nothing to be expected after death. Though in his philosophy he had held out hope for eternal life and a future state, in his personal life he had been cold to such ideas. Scheffner had often heard Kant scoff at prayer and other religious practices. Organized religion filled him with ire. It was clear to anyone who knew Kant personally that he had no faith in a personal God. Having postulated God and immortality, he himself did not believe in either. His considered opinion was that such beliefs were just a matter of 'individual needs'. Kant himself felt no such need."

-- Kant: A Biography, Manfred Kuehn, 2001, p. 3.