Death agony

“ L_____ gone, without a word, without a line, my short dream all shattered and shimmering about me! and a cold, black, unfathomable abyss before me,--never shall I forget the first petrifying yet bewildering agony--the severing, as it were, of body and soul--that I felt, and which I am certain must be what one feels when the real severing of them by death comes. ”

“ We move about, or sit on our beds, silent, almost motionless, in the speechless agony of woe, in the mute eloquence, of unutterable despair. After four long weary years of battle and marches, of prayers and tears, of pain and sacrifice, of wounds and woe, of blood and death, such an ending of our hopes, such a shocking disappointment, is bitter, cruel, crushing. Few tears are shed; there is no time for weakness or sentiment. The grief is too deep, the agony too terrible to find vent through the ordinary channels of distress. Hope seems forever buried, and naturally too. ”

“ That of their care thou hast no stronger proof?
Perhaps they do not like to hear or see
Thy last deep groan, thy dying agony!
The grass upspurn’d,
Thine eye upturn’d,
Bespeak its weight to heedless passers by!
That hoarse deep sigh, the sad effect of sin,
Proclaims the depth of agony within!
On man and beast,
Greatest and least,
Grim Death doth feed, and glad his victim win! ”

“ When the patient is beloved the struggle is touched with agony, but where one fights with Death over the body of a stranger there is a weird enchantment in the contest without personal pain, and as one forces back the hated foe there is a curious triumph in the feeling which marks the death-grip yielding up its prey, as one snatches back to earth the life which had well-nigh perished. ”

“ It is absolutely impossible to give even a faint idea of the horror, the agony, the heart-rending terror that harrowed up his soul, whenever the thought of death flashed across his mind. He received me with phrensied ardour, in which hope and fear were strongly depicted. ”

“ In life, you turned from him—in death, he turns from you. Fall, fall, fall, to rise again in hopeless misery, and sink again in lonely agony forever!" All space took up the last four words of my terrible sentence, and myriads of voices, some sweet and sad, some with wicked, vindictive glee, echoed and re-echoed like a refrain, "In lonely agony forever!" ”

“ In this agony they sigh, groan, utter indistinct sounds, and remain in the jaws of death, till, by the utmost efforts of nature, or some external assistance, they escape out of that dreadful torpid state. ”

“ Those records of agony from tortured nerves, from heart-hunger, and heartbreak, have a most profound pathos. One of the most sublime spectacles ever seen was her life at that time—a woman of organization so sensitive that she could almost feel it if a shadow crossed the sun, her mortal part wholly disproportioned to the soul it held: "battling with life and death, and grief and fate," sending a shuddering cry along those pages for some human help, some human solace, yet saying amid the thick darkness, "These ills cannot happen without the sanction of God" ”

“ The agonies of the dying sinner will not be one agony only, but they will be many. It will be one agony to be tormented by the devil. When the hour of death comes, that dreadful enemy uses all his strength to ruin that soul which is on the point of launching into eternity. ”

“ As peacefully as a child sinks to rest on a mother's bosom, sunk he into Death's embrace.
The agony of the hour, when it is said of a beloved one, "he is dead," has never—nor can it be justly portrayed. ”

“ The creeping flames soon restored her to consciousness through the agony which they inflicted upon her, and she shrieked pitifully for the help that none would give her, until death at last put an end to her sufferings. ”

“ Every thought seemed pregnant with suffering, and sometimes bursts of agony were scrawled in trembling characters, that spoke the very extremity of terror. "Who is there can endure fire and flame for ever, for ever, and for ever?" "Death is before us—Hell follows it!" ”

“ He climbed the lonely mount in the garden of olive trees to pass through the last agony, the agony of death, which seized upon even the Son of God so long as He was still bound by the laws of the human body. ”

“ Sometimes the last impression of life is [Pg 20] stamped on the face of death, sometimes we see in the awful fixity of feature that attends upon dissolution, the index of the agony in which life has passed, but more often, thank God, death lays upon pain and sorrow a smoothing, calming hand. It was so in this instance. There was a great peace, a great relief, in the face he looked upon; this poor woman had been tortured not only in body, that he knew, but she had suffered anguish of soul of which he was unaware, and death, had it come in gentler form would perhaps not have been unwelcome. ”

“ The hour of birth should be prayed for in the litany as well as that of death, and so it would be if we could remember the agony of horror which, no doubt, we felt at birth—surpassing, no doubt, the utmost agony of apprehension that can be felt on death. ”

“ The true wretchedness, indeed—the ultimate wo—is particular, not diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass—for this let us thank a merciful God!
To be buried while alive, is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death, are at best shadowy and vague. ”

“ The inch to inch combat with death is a fearful agony; yet what is it to the horrible sensations of seeming death, in which the consciousness survives all power of exertion, and the mind burns bright within while the body is about to be given to the earth. Can there be such a state as this? ”

“ The last moments of life are more distressing to witness than to endure. What is termed "the agony of death" concerns the watcher by the bedside rather than the being who is the subject of pity. A last illness may be long, wearisome and painful, but the closing moments of it are, as a rule, free from suffering. ”

“ And though the thought of death, and the particular disaster that had befallen him fell upon his spirit sometimes with a shadow that plunged the whole world into desperate darkness, he could not deny that the shadow was gradually lifting, and the character of the agony that had desolated him was becoming less spontaneous, till, in the end, it became almost a calculable emotion that might be indulged or banished at will. ”

“ You and I and every man and woman in this world whom sin has known—alas! that there should be so many—have looked into his marble face, have felt the touch of his pitiless hands, and the cold despair of his unloving embrace. For there is Death spiritual and Death physical, and many of us who bear no traces of our past in the present of to-day, have fought our grim battle with the death—the—death——”
And then my father’s words died away upon his lips, and the whole congregation knew what had already thrown me into an agony of terror. ”

“ It can't be that life is so senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong! ”

“ As soon as unconsciousness comes on, the struggles cease, and the body remains beneath the surface. During all this agony the suffering of the drowning man is undoubtedly chiefly mental. It comes from the instinctive dread of death which even the stoic cannot rid himself of, and is of the same nature as the mental agony of the condemned man before his execution, though less prolonged. ”

“ All our fear, and chafing, and anxiety pass for worse than nothing. When our nearest and dearest ones are at the point of death no amount of agony and tears, with wringing of hands, or convulsions even, can avail anything. ”

“ AGONY is a term used to signify an extreme degree of pain, or the last pangs of death. The terror of death appears, in a great degree, occasioned by the contortions and convulsions with which the agony seems attended ”

“ In like manner it is impossible for thee to understand how I could suffer such intense agony in one short moment."
And if some people apparently pass away most peacefully, this is because nature, exhausted by suffering, has no longer the force to struggle with death. ”

“ These are conspicuous when the pains are acute, whether they be sensational or emotional.
Bodily agony long borne produces death by exhaustion. More frequently, arresting the action of the heart for a time, it causes that temporary death we call fainting. ”

“ But let death come; and at once we overwhelm it with all the evil done before it. Not a tear but is remembered and used as a reproach, not a cry of pain but becomes a cry of accusation. Death alone bears the weight of the errors of nature or the ignorance of science that have uselessly prolonged torments in whose name we curse death because it puts an end to them.
[Pg 14]
V THE PANGS OF DEATH MUST BE
ATTRIBUTED TO MAN ALONE
In point of fact, whereas the sicknesses belong to nature or to life, the agony, which seems peculiar to death, is wholly in the hands of men. ”

“ Strand is accredited with saying that agony of the mind produces rupture of the heart. It is quite common to hear the expression, "Died of a broken heart;" and, strange to say, in some cases postmortem examination has proved the actual truth of the saying. Bartholinus, Fabricius Hildanus, Pliny, Rhodius, Schenck, Marcellus Donatus, Riedlin, and Garengeot speak of death from fright and fear, and the Ephemerides describes a death the direct cause of which was intense shame. ”

“ and in the same way, again, are not the thoughts of men and women in the agony of death often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, internal, intestinal aspect, towards that 'seamy side' of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, a side which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death? ”

“ To move wild laughter in the throat of death? It cannot be; it is impossible; Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. ”

“ What task can be more difficult than to describe the overwhelming agony which heavy and unexpected misery produces. To have lived the day that Idalie had just lived—a day in which all the beauty of existence had been unveiled to its very depths; to have dreamt, as she had done, a dream of love that steeped her soul in divine and almost uncommunicable joy; and now to sink from this pinnacle of happiness into a black and lampless cavern, the habitation of death, whose spectral form and chilling spirit was felt through all the air! ”

“ The mad pulse beat back the baffled life with a low sob.
And so the stark and naked soul unfolded its wings to the dimness of Death!
A lonely, unknown Death.
A Death that left this dumb living body as his endless mark. ”

“ A shot, a cry, a struggle, and a fainting woman's kiss;
Life's blood let 'mid the grasses—and all a world was lost,
And no one may ever know how he paid the cost.
He is lost in the crowd of the dead, in the night-time of death,
A name on a stone left to tell that he ever drew breath.
So desperate body die there, with your soul's long release,
And, unhappy spirit, God grant you Eternity's peace! ”

“ When I lay my body down, as those who die, and my shrinking mind imagines the hour itself with all its horrors is at hand: so intently do I conceive it all, as though I were in the very agony of dying, that I shall seem to be already in the place of torment, beholding what you speak of and every kind of anguish. ”

“ Death came on rapidly in deep, resounding roars, and the misery of the cringing, suffering brute was unfolded—told in heart-rending intonations, until at last he gave up his breath in one terror-stricken cry. ”

“ Then, then the pain—the infinity of feeling—
Words fail to paint its anguish. Reason, reeling,
Staggered with torture through his burning brain,
While his teeth gnashed with bitterness and pain;
Reflection grew a scorpion, speech had fled,
And all but madness and despair were dead.
XXI. He slept to dream of death, or worse than death;
For death were bliss, and the convulsive wrath
Of living torture peace, to the dread weight
That pressed upon sensation, while the light
Of reason gleamed but horror, and strange hosts
Of hideous phantasies, like threatening ghosts. ”

“ Of thine unchanging smile?
Hast thou the secret consciousness
That grief is not worth while?
That sorrow is the consequence
Of former lives of sin,—
The spur that goads us on and up
A nobler life to win?
That pain is as impermanent
As shadows on the hills,
And that Nirvana's blessedness
Will cure all mortal ills?
But agony is agony,
And small is the relief
If, measured with eternity,
Life's anguish be but brief.
To hearts that break with misery,
To every tortured frame
The present pain is paramount,
Nirvana but a name. ”

“ Sitting there in the dark and the cold, he grew barely conscious of his own pain. This is Nature’s mercy. When the wound is beyond bearing she draws away the sufferer’s consciousness, and an extremity of agony brings its own relief, if only for a little while. ”

“ One smites him with pains in his body, with headache, heartache, backache, shortness of breath, fainting qualms, trembling of joints, stopping at the chest, and almost all the symptoms of a man past all recovery. Now, while death is thus tormenting the body, hell is busy with the mind and conscience, striking them with its pains, casting sparks of fire in thither, wounding with sorrows and fears of everlasting damnation the spirit of this poor creature. ”