at death's door

Idioms  

1. On the point of dying, very ill, as in Whenever she had a bad cold she acted as though she were at death's door. The association of death with an entry way was first made in English in the late 1300s, and the phrase itself dates from the mid-1500s. Today it is often used as an exaggeration of ill health.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

at death's door

The musical “Rock & Roll Man” starts with an attention-grabbing gambit: It is 1965, and J. Edgar Hoover is prosecuting the D.J. and promoter Alan Freed, then at death’s door.

From New York Times ● Jun. 21, 2023

They want to let patients like Zurawski obtain lifesaving care before they are actually at death’s door.

From Slate ● Mar. 7, 2023

There was something different happening here: the ex-con at death’s door coming clean with his regrets.

From Seattle Times ● Sep. 8, 2021

Premature grief is the specter hovering over war-torn Yemen’s famine cases — malnourished children at death’s door — in Skye Fitzgerald’s latest dispatch from the Middle East, “Hunger Ward.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 1, 2021

It troubled Leah that people thought our household deficient, not because our mother was parked at death’s door, but because we lacked a bákala mpandi-—a strong man—to oversee us.

From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver

Related Words

• decaying
• doomed
• fading
• moribund