living death

living death

A life full of pain or suffering. It's a shame that some men treat marriage and family life like a living death. If I ever lost my independence due to injury or illness, it would be a living death. I don't like relying on other people.
See also: death, living
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

a living death

If someone's life is described as a living death, their quality of life is extremely poor. For nearly four years he has lain in a coma, trapped in what one doctor described as a `living death'. To be betrayed as you were betrayed is a living death.
See also: death, living
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.
See also:
  • a living death
  • cannot for the life of me/him/her/us/them
  • can't for the life of me
  • life
  • give (one's) life
  • the light of (one's) life
  • the light of somebody's life
  • the light of your life
  • rise from the dead
  • not give a stuff
References in periodicals archive
What people like Bishop inflict on the families of their victims is a living death."
The zombie entered US consciousness through the American occupation of Haiti, the site of an eighteenth-century rebellion of the enslaved that became a war for independence, thus making the figuration of living death inseparable from its resonances with both slavery and rebellion.
Drug addiction is like a living death. It may even be better to die rather than be afflicted by drug addiction.
For Mia Couto, storytelling not only makes us human, it resuscitates us from the living death brought on by our baser instincts and shelters writers--and readers--from the violence and fear that dehumanize us all.
The siege is living death, slowly crushing the life out of Gaza.
Many years ago, my good friend Harold Petersen taught me that when a client experiences a disability that prevents them from earning a living, it is a "living death." It is one of the most powerful and completely accurate phrases I have ever heard.
Caught between fear and hope, Kugel sees knowledge as a burden that condemns mankind, and American Jews in particular, to a kind of living death: with knowledge (but no direct experience) of past suffering, Kugel can only expect the worst, and his obsession with death manifests itself in a collection of real and imagined last words of famous people as well as his perpetual list-making, as he keeps a running catalogue of his own pithy experiments with eulogistic one-liners along with a humorously short list of items needed in case of disaster(200).
This way you don't just kill a woman and put her out of her suffering ( after all there is peace in death) but condemn her to something much worse -- a living death, a lifetime in hell on earth.
Phrases such as "the forest panted out its beefy halitosis" and "she was touching living death, and the feel of it was bituminous, hard and soft" are both chilling and evocative, and are well-complimented by eerie allusions elsewhere.
Lauro is currently writing a book, Rise Up: Living Death, Slavery, and Rebellion, exploring the nature of zombies and society.
This book is so complete that it even details how to handle underwriting issues and includes a page about living death, prepared by Solomon S.
Even as they give artificial respiration to their predecessors, all desire this living death, for a book is "a dead thing" that only resuscitates when "a breath of living reading ...
Jesus' death interrupts sin's vicious cycles of "reciprocal violence" (644-45), captured in K.'s phrase "living by another's death." The incarnation enables an exchange in which "the triune God takes on their living death and draws them into God's true life" (646).
Living death. The child who cries over a mark of 98 on a test because it's not 100.
When the wild oats start to turn, and the dandelions and wild barley have woven their way through the oats, making an almost impenetrable wall of living death, you have to get out there and start hacking, cutting.