living death

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living death (usually uncountable, plural living deaths)

1. (idiomatic) A condition of suffering, solitude, or impairment so extreme as to deprive one's existence of all happiness and meaning.
   • c. 1593 (date written), [William Shakespeare], The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. […] (First Quarto), London: […] Valentine Sims [and Peter Short] for Andrew Wise, […], published 1597, →OCLC, [Act I, scene ii], signature B2, recto:

      La[dy Anne]. Neuer hung poiſon on a fouler toade,
     Out of my ſight thou doeſt infect my eies.
      Glo[ucester]. Thine eies ſweete Lady haue infected mine.
      La[dy Anne]. Would they were baſiliſkes to ſtrike thee dead.
      Glo[ucester]. I would they were that I might die at once,
     For now they kill me with a liuing death: […]

   • 1860, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], “Tending to Refute the Popular Prejudice against the Present of a Pocket-knife”, in The Mill on the Floss […], volume II, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book III (The Downfall), page 82:

     Mr Tulliver, who had begun, in his intervals of consciousness, to manifest an irritability which often appeared to have as a direct effect the recurrence of spasmodic rigidity and insensibility, had lain in this living death throughout the critical hours when the noise of the sale came nearest to his chamber.

   • 1893, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “The Fall of the Catinats”, in The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents, volume II, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, [part I (In the Old World)], page 188:

     If their creed were no longer tolerated, then, and if they remained true to it, they must either fly from the country or spend a living death tugging at an oar or working in a chain-gang upon the roads.

   • 1904, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 9, in The Master Mummer:

     "[W]e cling so closely here to our own doctrine of isolation. . . ."
     "Isobel is intended, then?" I asked.
     "For the Church," Madame Richard answered. . . .
     "Madame," I answered, "Isobel is meant for life—not a living death."

   • 2004 November 7, John Schwartz, James Estrin, “Living for Today, Locked in a Paralyzed Body”, in New York Times, retrieved 12 June 2014:

     A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig's disease, is often described as a kind of living death in which the body goes flaccid while the mind remains intact and acutely aware.

• agony
• desolation
• misery

• “living death”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.